Chapter XVIII · THE SUCCESSION TO THE KINGDOM IN ANCIENT LATIUM (continued 2)

|At the festival of the seventh of July women were probably thought to be fertilised by the fig as well as to fertilise it.| But it is possible and indeed probable that the fertilisation was believed to be mutual; in other words, it may have been imagined, that while the women caused the fig-tree to bear fruit, the tree in its turn caused them to bear children. This conjecture is confirmed by a remarkable African parallel. The Akikuyu of British East Africa attribute to the wild fig-tree |Supposed fertilisation of barren women by the wild fig-tree among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.| the power of fertilising barren women. For this purpose they apply the white sap or milk to various parts of the body of the would-be mother; then, having sacrificed a goat, they tie the woman to a wild fig-tree with long strips cut from the intestines of the sacrificial animal. “This seems,” writes Mr. C. W. Hobley, who reports the custom, “to be a case of the tree marriage of India. I fancy there is an idea of ceremonial marriage with the ancestral spirits which are said to inhabit certain of these fig-trees; in fact it supports the Kamba idea of the spiritual husbands.”^[1028] The belief in spiritual husbands, 317|Belief of the Akamba that the spirits of the dead live in wild fig-trees.| to which Mr. Hobley here briefly refers, is as follows. The Akamba of British East Africa imagine that every married woman is at the same time the wife of a living man and also the wife of the spirit of some departed ancestor (aimu). They are firmly convinced that the fertility of a wife depends to a great extent on the attentions of her spiritual husband, and if she does not conceive within six months after marriage they take it as a sign that her spiritual husband is neglecting her; so they offer beer and kill a goat as a propitiatory sacrifice. If after that the woman still remains barren, they make a bigger feast and kill a bullock. On the other hand, if a wife is found to be with child soon after marriage, they are glad and consider it a proof that she has found favour in the eyes of her ghostly husband. Further, they believe that at death the human spirit quits the bodily frame and takes up its abode in a wild fig-tree (mumbo); hence they build miniature huts at the foot of those fig-trees which are thought to be haunted by the souls of the dead, and they periodically sacrifice to these spirits.^[1029] Accordingly, we may conjecture, though we are not told, that amongst the Akamba, as among the Akikuyu, a barren woman sometimes resorts to a wild fig-tree in order to obtain a child, since she believes that her spiritual spouse has his abode in the tree. The Akikuyu clearly attribute a special power of fertilisation to the milky sap of the tree, since they apply it to various parts of the woman who desires to become a mother: perhaps they regard it as the seed of the fig. This may explain why the Roman slave-women offered the milky juice of the tree to Juno Caprotina; they may have intended thereby to add to the fecundity of the mother goddess. And we can scarcely doubt that the rods which they cut from the wild fig-tree, for the purpose apparently of beating each other, were supposed to communicate the generative virtue of the tree to the women who 318|Supposed fertilisation of women by the wild banana-tree among the Baganda.| were struck by them. The Baganda of Central Africa appear to ascribe to the wild banana-tree the same power of removing barrenness which the Akikuyu attribute to the wild fig-tree. For when a wife has no child, she and her husband will sometimes repair to a wild banana-tree and there, standing one on each side of the tree, partake of the male organs of a goat, the man eating the flesh and drinking the soup and the woman drinking the soup only. This is believed to ensure conception after the husband has gone in to his wife.^[1030] Here again, as among the Akikuyu, we see that the fertilising virtue of the tree is reinforced by the fertilising virtue of the goat; and we can therefore better understand why the Romans called the male wild fig-tree “goat-fig,” and why the Messenians dubbed it simply “he-goat.”

|The Roman king may have celebrated a sacred marriage on the Nonae Caprotinae as a charm to make the fig-trees bear fruit.| The association of the death of Romulus with the festival of the wild fig-tree can hardly be accidental, especially as he and his twin-brother Remus were said to have been suckled by the she-wolf under a fig-tree, the famous ficus Ruminalis, which was shewn in the forum as one of the sacred objects of Rome and received offerings of milk down to late times.^[1031] Indeed, some have gone so far both in ancient and modern times as to derive the names of Romulus and Rome itself from this fig-tree (ficus Ruminalis); if they are right, Romulus was “the fig-man” and Rome “the fig-town.”^[1032] Be that as it may, the clue to the association of Romulus with the fig is probably furnished by the old belief that the king is responsible for the fruits of the earth and the rain from heaven. We may conjecture that on this principle the Roman king was expected to make the fig-trees blossom and 319bear figs, and that in order to do so he masqueraded as the god of the fig-tree and went through a form of sacred marriage, either with his queen or with a slave-woman, on the July day when the husbandmen resorted to a more efficacious means of producing the same result. The ceremony of the sacred marriage need not have been restricted to a single day in the year. It may well have been repeated for many different crops and fruits. If the Queen of Athens was annually married to the god of the vine, why should not the King of Rome have annually wedded the goddess of the fig?

|The marriage of the divine king or human god often followed by his death.| But, as we have seen, Romulus, the first king of Rome, is said to have perished on the day of this festival of the fig, which, if our hypothesis is correct, was also the day of his ceremonial marriage to the tree. That the real date of his death should have been preserved by tradition is very improbable; rather we may suppose that the reason for dating his death and his marriage on the same day was drawn from some ancient ritual in which the two events were actually associated. But we have still to ask, Why should the king’s wedding-day be also the day of his death? The answer must be deferred for the present. All we need say now is that elsewhere the marriage of the divine king or human god has been regularly followed at a brief interval by his violent end. For him, as for others, death often treads on the heels of love.^[1033]

320|Violent ends of Tatius, Tullus Hostilius, and other Roman kings.| Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men to whom he had given umbrage despatched him with the sacrificial knives and spits which they had snatched from the altar.^[1034] The occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa, was commonly said to have been killed by lightning, but many held that he was murdered at the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him.^[1035] Speaking of the more or less mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that “his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings. For of the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of the remaining four not one died a natural death; for three of them were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts.”^[1036] This implies that King Ancus Marcius, as well as Tarquin the Elder and Servius Tullius, perished by the hand of an assassin. No other ancient historian, so far as I know, records this of Ancus Marcius, though one of them says that the king “was carried off by an untimely death.”^[1037] Tarquin the Elder was slain by two murderers whom the sons of his predecessor, Ancus Marcius, had hired to do the deed.^[1038] Lastly, Servius Tullius came by his end in circumstances which recall the combat for the priesthood of Diana at Nemi. He was attacked by his successor and killed by his orders, though not by his hand. Moreover, he lived among the oak groves of the Esquiline Hill at the head of the 321Slope of Virbius, and it was here, beside a sanctuary of Diana, that he was slain.^[1039]

|The succession to the Latin kingshipmay sometimes have been decided by single combat.| These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the ordeal of battle, and he who cut his adversary’s throat was thought thereby to have proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of cavil.^[1040] “Any one who remembers how in the forests of Westphalia the Femgericht set the modern civil law at defiance down into the eighteenth century, and how in the mountains of Corsica and Sardinia blood-revenge has persisted and persists to our own days, will not wonder that hardly a century after the union of Italy the Roman legislation had not yet succeeded in putting down the last relics of this ancient Italian or rather Indo-European mode of doing justice in the nests of the Apennines.”^[1041]

|Combats for the kingdom in Africa.| A parallel to what I conceive to have been the rule of the 322old Latin kingship is furnished by a West African custom of to-day. When the Maluango or king of Loango, who is deemed the representative of God on earth, has been elected, he has to take his stand at Nkumbi, a large tree near the entrance to his sacred ground. Here, encouraged by one of his ministers, he must fight all rivals who present themselves to dispute his right to the throne.^[1042] This is one of the many instances in which the rites and legends of ancient Italy are illustrated by the practice of modern Africa. Similarly among the Banyoro of Central Africa, whose king had to take his life with his own hand whenever his health and strength began to fail, the succession to the throne was determined by a mortal combat among the claimants, who fought till only one of them was left alive.^[1043] Even in England a relic of a similar custom survived till lately in the coronation ceremony, at which a champion used to throw down his glove and challenge to mortal combat all who disputed the king’s right to the crown. The ceremony was witnessed by Pepys at the coronation of Charles the Second.^[1044]

|In Greece and Italy kings probably personated Cronus and Saturn, the god of the seed, before they personated Zeus and Jupiter, the god of the oak.| In the foregoing enquiry we have found reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated not only Jupiter the god of the oak, but Saturn the god of the seed and perhaps also the god of the fig-tree. The question naturally arises, Did they do so simultaneously or successively? In other words, did the same king regularly represent the oak-god at one season of the year, the seed-god at another, and the fig-god at a third? or were there separate dynasties of oak-kings, seed-kings, and fig-kings, who belonged perhaps to different stocks and reigned at different times? The 323evidence does not allow us to answer these questions definitely. But tradition certainly points to the conclusion that in Latium and perhaps in Italy generally the seed-god Saturn was an older deity than the oak-god Jupiter, just as in Greece Cronus appears to have preceded Zeus. Perhaps Saturn and Cronus were the gods of an old indigenous and agricultural people; while Jupiter and Zeus were the divinities of a ruder invading race, which swarmed down into Italy and Greece from the forests of central Europe, bringing their wild woodland deities to dwell in more fertile lands, under softer skies, side by side with the gods of the corn and the vine, the olive and the fig. If that was so, we may suppose that before the irruption of these northern barbarians the old kings of Greece and Italy personated the gods of the fat field and fruitful orchard, and that it was not till after the conquest that their successors learned to pose as the god of the verdant oak and the thundering sky. However, on questions so obscure we must be content to suspend our judgment. It is unlikely that the student’s search-light will ever pierce the mists that hang over these remote ages. All that we can do is to follow the lines of evidence backward as far as they can be traced, till, after growing fainter and fainter, they are lost altogether in the darkness.

324