ROMAN PEOPLE (continued 2)

If all these last-mentioned dies religiosi are such because ancient popular feeling attached the religio to them, we may infer, I think, that the same was really the case also with the dies postriduani. The fact that the authorities of the State had made one or two days religiosi as anniversaries of disasters, supplied a handy explanation for a number of other dies religiosi of which the true explanation had been entirely lost; but that there was such a true explanation, resting on very primitive beliefs, I have very little doubt. Lucky and unlucky days are found in the unwritten calendars of primitive peoples in many parts of the world. An old pupil, now a civil servant in the province of Madras, has sent me an elaborate account of the notions of this kind existing in the minds of the Tamil-speaking people of his district of southern India. The Celtic calendar recently discovered at Coligny in France contains a number of mysterious marks, some of which may have had a meaning of this kind.78 Dr. Jevons has collected some other examples from various parts of the world, e.g. Mexico.79 The old Roman superstition about the luckiness of odd days and the unluckiness of even ones, which appears, as we shall see, in the arrangement of the calendar, was probably at one time a popular Italian notion, not derived, as used to be thought, from Pythagoras and his school.

I therefore conclude that we may add times and seasons to the list of those objects, animate and inanimate, which were affected by the practice of taboo in primitive Rome; and I hold that the word religiosus, as applied both to times and places, exactly expresses the feeling on which that practice is based. The word religiosus came to have another meaning (though it retained the old one as well) in historical times, and the Romans could be called religiosissimi mortalium in the sense of paying close attention to worship and all its details. But the original meaning of religio and religiosus may after all have been that nervous anxiety which is a special characteristic of an age of taboo.80 To discover the best methods of soothing that anxiety, or, in other words, the methods of disinfection, was the work of the organised religious life of family and State which we are going to study. But I must first devote a lecture to another class of primitive survivals.

NOTES TO LECTURE II

LECTURE III

ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: MAGIC

Taboo, the traces of which at Rome we examined in the last lecture, is, as we saw, closely allied to magic, even if it be not, as Dr. Frazer thinks, magic in a negative form. We have now to see what traces are to be found of magic in the proper or usual sense of the word—active or positive magic, as we may call it. By this we are to understand the exercise of a mysterious mechanical power by an individual on man, spirit, or deity, to enforce a certain result. In magic there is no propitiation, no prayer. "He who performs a purely magical act," says Dr. Westermarck,81 "utilises such mechanical power without making any appeal at all to the will of a supernatural being." Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude of regard and dependence; in a religious stage man feels himself in the hands of a supernatural power with whom he desires to be in right relation.

If we accept this distinction, as I think we may (though one school of anthropologists is hardly disposed to do so), it is plain that magical practices are of a totally different kind from religious practices, as being the result of a different mental attitude towards the supernatural; they belong to a ruder and more rudimentary idea of the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. True, they have their origin in the same kind of human experience, in the difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence, and his desire to overcome these; but unlike religion, magic is a wholly inadequate attempt to overcome them. This inadequacy was long ago well explained by Dr. Jevons.82 He showed that man in that early stage of his experience did not understand the true relation of cause and effect; that, "turned loose as it were among innumerable possible causes (of a given effect), with nothing to guide his choice, the chances against his making the right choice were considerable." As a matter of fact he usually made the wrong one, and is still apt to do so. There is probably more magic going on behind the scenes even in civilised countries, and more especially both in Greece and Italy, than either men of science or men of religion have any idea of. In its various forms as they are now classified,83 e.g. contagious magic, and homoeopathic magic, the exercise of the mysterious will-power, real or imaginary, is to be found all the world over, accompanied usually with a spell or incantation which is believed to enforce and increase that power—a kind of telepathy, which seems to be the psychological basis, so far as there is one, of the whole system. In these rites the virtue resides in some action, which, together with the spell or incantation, enforces the desired result by calling out the will-power, or mana, if we adopt the convenient Melanesian word lately brought into use. Whatever percentage of psychological truth may lie at the root of such performances, it is obvious that they must in the main be wholly inadequate, and must constantly tend to pass into mere quackery and become discredited; and it was the special function of the religious organisation of early society to eliminate and discredit them.

But it was a long stage in the evolution of society before man arrived at a better knowledge of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe; before he reached the idea of a god or spirit realisable and nameable, and thus capable of being addressed, placated, worshipped. When this stage is reached, there supervenes almost always a strong tendency to regulate and systematise the methods of address, placation, and worship; and among some peoples, e.g. the Romans, for reasons which it is by no means easy to explain, this tendency is much stronger than among others. Wherever it has been strong, wherever these methods of putting oneself in right relation with the Power have been systematised by a central authority or priesthood, and thus made into religious law, there, as we might naturally expect, the performances and performers of magic have been most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public magician into a king84 are of this primitive kind, or are mere survivals of magic in a higher stage of civilisation—such survivals as there will always be among forms and ceremonies, of which it is man's nature to be tenacious. But religion, once firmly established, invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician, as claiming to exercise mysterious powers outside the pale of the legally recognised methods of propitiation and worship. As Dr. Tylor observed long ago, the more civilised the race, the more apt it is to associate magic with men of inferior civilisation.85 In the Jewish law, though magic was well known to the Jews and privately practised, there is no recognition of it; the magical books attributed to Solomon were suppressed, according to tradition, by the pious king Hezekiah.86 So too at Rome, where the outward forms of religion were also very highly systematised, magic, as it seems to me, was rigorously excluded from the State ritual, though it continued in use in private life under certain precautions taken by the State; in the few genuine examples of it in the rites belonging to the ius divinum (i.e. those used and sanctioned for the purposes of the community), it is nothing more than a survival of which the magical meaning was unknown to the writers from whom we hear of it.

A good example of such survivals is the curious ceremony of the aquaelicium, without doubt a genuine case of magical "rain-making"—one of the many inadequate and blundering attempts on the part of primitive man to obtain what he needs. Probably it may be classed under the head of "sympathetic magic," but the evidence as to what was done in the ceremony is not quite explicit enough to allow us to do this confidently.87 It was, of course, not included in the religious calendar, as it would be only occasionally called for, and could not be fixed to a day; but there is clear evidence that it was sanctioned by the State, for the pontifices took part in it, and the magistrates without the toga praetexta, and the lictors carrying the fasces reversed.88 A stone, which lay outside the walls near the Porta Capena, was brought into the city by the pontifices, so far as we can make out the details, and it has been conjectured that it was taken to an altar of Jupiter Elicius on the Aventine hard by, this cult-title of the god of the sky having possibly some relation to the technical name of the ceremony. What was done with the stone we unluckily do not know; but it has been reasonably conjectured that it was a hollow one, and that it was filled with water which was allowed to run over the edge, as a means of inducing the rain-god to suffer the heavens to overflow.89 It was called lapis manalis; and the epithet here can have nothing to do with the Manes, as in the case of another lapis manalis, of which I shall have a word to say later on, but must mean "pouring" or "overflowing." One or two other fragments of evidence point in the same direction, and I think we may fairly conclude that the rite was originally one of sympathetic magic—that as the stone overflowed, so the sky would pour down rain. In my Roman Festivals I have pointed out a remarkable parallel to this in the collections of the Golden Bough; in a Samoan village a stone represented the god of rain, and in a drought his priests carried it in procession and dipped it in a stream.

This parallel I owe to Dr. Frazer's wide knowledge of all such practices among savage peoples. But this ever helpful and friendly guide, in treating of the Jupiter Elicius concerned in this ceremony, has gone beyond the evidence, and attributed to the Romans another kind of magic of which I believe they were quite innocent. He has been led to this by his theory that kings were developed out of successful magicians. In his lectures on the early history of the Kingship90 he maintains that the Roman kings practised the magical art of bringing down lightning from heaven. "The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the sky.... Tullus Hostilius is reported to have met with the same end (as Salmoneus, king of Elis) in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the clouds." To support these statements Dr. Frazer quotes Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, Arnobius, Aurelius Victor, and Zonaras—truly a formidable list of authorities; but without any attempt to discover where any of these late writers found the stories. Yet he had but to read Aust's admirable article "Jupiter" in the Mythological Lexicon91 to assure himself that legends which cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the second century B.C. cannot seriously be assumed to be genuinely Roman. Pliny happens to mention Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first lex de repetundis of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.92 We happen to know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical personage. Romulus would not drink wine one day because he was going to be very busy on the next. Then they said to him, "If we all did so, Romulus, wine would be cheap." "Nay, dear," he replied, "if every one drank as much as he wished; and that is exactly what I am doing."93 I quote the story simply as a good example of the way in which Roman historians could deal with their kings, and of the absolute necessity of acquainting oneself with their methods before building hypotheses upon their statements. I hardly need to add that another of Dr. Frazer's authorities, Arnobius, informs us that he took the story from the second book of Valerius Antias, a later writer than Piso, whose name is a byword even with the uncritical Livy for shameless exaggeration and mis-statement.94

But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world? Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians? Rain-making we can understand at Rome,—it had a practical end in view, the procuring of rain for the crops,—but why lightning and thunder, which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together, and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and practice;95 there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the Eastern magic.96 The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of aquaelicium; but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves in the Etruscan lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,97 they perverted the meaning of the epithet to suit their new studies, and began to attribute to their legendary kings powers which properly belonged to Etruscan or Oriental magicians. The second century B.C., when Piso wrote his Annals, is exactly the period when we should naturally expect such studies to come into fashion, and with such perversions of "history" as their consequence.98

I go on to note one or two more examples of real magic in the State religion; but they are hard to find. Pliny tells that even in his day people believed that a runaway slave who had not escaped out of the city might be arrested by a spell uttered by the Vestal virgins.99 I take this to mean that any one who had lost his slave might get the Vestals to use the spell as a means of keeping the runaway within the city. The word for spell is here precatio, i.e. a prayer, not carmen, which is the usual word for a spell; and Pliny evidently thinks of it as addressed to some god. But no doubt it was originally at least a genuine spell, of the same kind as others used in private life, which we shall notice directly; and it implies a belief in some magical power inherent in the Vestals, of whom we are told that if they accidentally met a criminal being led to punishment they might secure his release.100 As the spell in this case seems to be telepathic, i.e. an exercise of will-power projected from a distance, it may perhaps be paralleled with certain mystical powers exercised by women, especially when their husbands are at war, among some savage peoples;101 but we have no information about it beyond the passage in Pliny, and further guessing would be useless.

This last is a case of genuine magic, but it is outside the ritual of the State, though exercised by a State priesthood. Within that ritual there is one other very curious case of what must be classed as a magical process, and one that has accidentally become famous. At the Lupercalia on February 15, the two young men called Luperci, or, more strictly, belonging respectively as leaders to the two collegia of Luperci, girt themselves with the skins of the slaughtered victims, which were goats, and then ran round the base of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows, with strips of skin cut from the hides of these same victims. The object was to produce fertility; on this point our authorities are explicit.102 Thus this particular feature of the whole extraordinary ritual of the Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or carmen, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it survived, in outward form at least, until Rome had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. The Lupercalia has always been a puzzle to students of early religion, and as each new theory is advanced, this strange festival is seized on for fresh interpretation;103 but for our present purposes it must suffice to point out that we clearly find embedded in it a piece of genuine magic, dating beyond doubt from a very primitive stage of thought.

There is one other very curious performance, occurring each year on the ides of May, which in my view is rather magical than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification: I mean the casting into the Tiber from the pons sublicius of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal virgins, in the presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case of the substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.104 These puppets were called Argei, which word naturally suggests Greeks; and Wissowa has contrived to persuade himself not only that a number of Greeks were actually put to death by drowning in an age when everything Greek was beginning to be reverenced at Rome, but (still more extraordinary to an anthropologist) that the primitive device of substitution was had in requisition at that late date in order to carry on the memory of the ghastly deed. And the world of German learning has silently followed their leader, without taking the trouble to test his conclusions by a careful and independent examination of the evidence. It happens that this fascinating puzzle of the Argei was the first curiosity that enticed me into the study of the Roman religion, and for some thirty years I have been familiar with every scrap of evidence bearing on it; and after going over that evidence once more I can emphatically state my conviction that Wissowa's theory will not hold water for a moment. I shall return to the subject in a later lecture dealing with the religious history of the second Punic war; at present I merely express a belief that, whatever be the history of the accessories of the rite,—and they are various and puzzling,—the actual immersion of the puppets is the survival of a primitive piece of sympathetic magic, the object being possibly to procure rain. It is, in my opinion, quite impossible to resist the anthropological evidence for this conclusion, though we cannot really be certain about the object; for this evidence I must refer you to my Roman Festivals, and to the references there given.105

This rite of the Argei, then, was a case of genuine magic, and exercised by a State priesthood, virgins to whom certain magical powers were supposed to be attached; it was, I think, a popular performance, like one or two others which are also outside the limit of the Fasti,106 and was embodied in a more complicated ceremonial long after that calendar had been drawn up. In the ritual authorised by the State, with public objects in view, i.e. for the benefit of society as a whole, there is hardly a trace of anything that we can call genuine magic apart from the examples I have just been explaining. There were, I need not say, many survivals of magical processes of which the true magical intent had long been lost—ancient magical deposits in a social stratum of religion, which I shall notice in their proper place. This is not peculiar to the religion of the Romans; it is a phenomenon to be found in all religions, even in those of the most highly developed type, and it is one apt to cause some confusion as to the true distinction between magic and religion.107 It is easy to find magical processes even in Christian worship, if we have the will to do so; but if we steadily bear in mind that the true test of magic is not the nature of an act, but the intent or volition which accompanies it, the search will not be an easy one.

The modern French school of sociologists, which now has to be reckoned with in investigating the early history of religion, claims that magic was not originally, as we now see it, a matter of individual skill, but a sociological fact, i.e. it was used for the benefit of the community, as religion came to be in a later age. If this be true, as it very possibly is, we see at once how the dead bones of magical processes might survive, with their original meaning entirely lost, into an age in which higher and more reasonable ideas had been developed about the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. To take a single example from Rome, divination by the examination of a victim's entrails was originally a magical process, according to the opinion of most modern authorities;108 but it ceases to be magic when it is used simply to determine in the State ritual whether in a religious process the victim is perfect and agreeable to the deity. In fact magical formulae, magical instruments, unless they are used in the true spirit of magic, to compel, not to propitiate a deity, are no longer magic, and may be passed over here. When we come to discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, of lustratio, of vows, of divination, we may find it necessary to recall what has here been said. On the whole, we may conclude that organised religious cult, from its very nature and object, everywhere excluded magic in the true sense of the word; it implies prayer and propitiation, both of which are absolutely inconsistent with the object and methods of magic. Religion is the product of a higher stage of social development; it is the expression of a real advance of human thought; and in telling the story of the religious experience of the Roman people we are but indirectly concerned with those more rude and rudimentary ideas which it displaced.

But in private life, outside of the organised cult of the State and the family, magic was all through Roman history abundant, even over-abundant, and in this form I cannot pass it over entirely. Though the State authorities seem to have taken pains to exclude it rigidly from the public rites, and though there is little trace of it in the religious life of family and gens, yet there is evidence that it was deeply rooted in the nature of the people, and that they must have passed through an age in which it was an important factor in their social life. This fact, taken together with its almost complete elimination from the public religion, throws into relief the persistent efforts of the State authorities, from the framing of the old religious calendar to the time of the Augustan revival, to keep their relations with the Power clear of all that they believed to be unworthy or injurious. No better example can be found of the inherent antagonism between religion and magic.

Private magic may be divided into two kinds, according as it was used to damage another, or only to benefit oneself. In the former case the State interfered to protect the person threatened with damage, and treated this kind of magic as a crime. The commonest form of it was that of the spell, or carmen, no doubt often sung, and accompanied by some action which would bring it under the head of sympathetic magic; but the spell alone is taken cognisance of by the State. Pliny has preserved three words from the XII. Tables which tell their own tale: "qui fruges excantassit."109 Servius, commenting on the line of Virgil's 8th Eclogue, "atque satas alio vidi traducere messes," writes, "magicis quibusdam artibus hoc fiebat, unde est in XII. Tabb. 'Neve alienam segetem pellexeris.'" These last words, with the verb in the second person, are probably not quoted exactly from the ancient text,110 but they help to show us the nature of this hostile spell. There must have been a belief that the spirit, or life, or fructifying power of your neighbour's crops could be enticed away and transferred to your own. This is confirmed by a remark of St. Augustine in the de Civitate Dei;111 after quoting the same line from Virgil, he adds, "eo quod hac pestifera scelerataque doctrina fructus alieni in alias terras transferri perhibentur, nonne in XII. Tabulis, id est Romanorum antiquissimis legibus, Cicero commemorat esse conscriptum et ei qui hoc fecerit supplicium constitutum?" Given the belief, the temptation can be well understood if we reflect that the arable land of the old Romans was divided in sections of a square, and that each man's allotment would have that of a neighbour on two sides at least.112 If one man's corn were found to be more flourishing than that of his neighbours, what more likely than that he should have enticed away the spirit of their crops? The process reminds us, as it reminded Pliny, of the evocatio of the gods of foreign communities, a rite which belongs to religion and not to magic, though it doubtless had its origin in the same class of ideas as the excantatio.

In more general terms the old Roman law (i.e. originally the ius divinum) forbade the use of evil spells, as we see in another fragment of the Tables, "qui malum carmen incantassit." In later times this was usually taken as referring to libel and slander, but there can be no doubt that the carmina here alluded to were originally magical, and became carmina famosa in the course of legal interpretation. Cicero seems to combine the two meanings in the de Rep. (iv. 10. 2) when he says that the Tables made it a capital offence "si quis occentavisset, sive carmen condidisset quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri" (to bring shame or criminal reproach on another). In the later sense these carmina have a curious history, into which I cannot enter now.113 In the earlier sense they existed and flourished without doubt, in spite of the law; or it may be that, as the words of the Tables were interpreted in the new sense, the old form of offence was tolerated in private. "We are all afraid," says Pliny, "of being 'nailed' (defigi) by spells and curses" (diris precationibus).114 These dirae, and all the various forms of love-charms, defixiones, accompanied by the symbolic actions which are found all the world over, lie outside my present subject, and are so familiar to us all in Roman literature that I do not need to dwell on them.115

Nor of the common harmless kind of magic need I say much now. It survived, of course, alongside of the religion of the family and State, from the earliest times to the latest, as it survives at the present day in all countries civilised and uncivilised; and being harmless the State took no heed of it. Some assortment of charms and spells for the cure of diseases will be found in Cato's book on agriculture, and one or two incidentally occur in that of Varro.116 They performed the work of insurance against both fire and accident, and even such a man as Julius Caesar was not independent of such arts. Pliny tells us that after experiencing a carriage accident he used to repeat a certain spell three times as soon as he had taken his seat in a vehicle, and adds significantly, "id quod plerosque nunc facere scimus."117 Such carmina were written on the walls of houses to insure them against fire.118 Pliny has a large collection of small magical delusions and superstitions, many of which have an interest for anthropologists, in the 28th book of his Natural History.

Another kind of harmless magic, to which the Romans, like all Italians ancient and modern, were peculiarly addicted, is the use of amulets. Here there is no spell, or obvious and expressed exercise of will-power on the part of the individual, but the potent influence, mana, or whatever we choose to call it, resides in a material object which brings good luck, like the cast horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the raison d'être of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."119 A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the Dictionary of Antiquities, and in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie, s.v. "amulet," and it is not necessary here to explain the various kinds in use in Italy; but I must dwell for a moment on one type, which had been taken up into the life of the family, and in one sense into that of the State, viz. the bulla worn by children, both boys and girls.

The bulla was a small object, enclosed in historical times in a capsule, and suspended round the child's neck. It was popularly believed to have been originally an Etruscan custom,120 and borrowed by the Romans, like so many other ornaments. It is, however, much more probable that the custom was old Italian (as indeed the "medicine-bag" is world-wide), and that the Etruscan contribution to it was merely the case or capsule, which was of gold where the family could afford it—gold itself being supposed to have some potency as a charm.121 The object within the case was, as Pliny tells us, a res turpicula as a rule,122 and this may remind us that a fascinum was carried in the car of the triumphator as medicus invidiae, to use Pliny's pregnant expression. The triumphing general needed special protection; he appeared in the guise of Jupiter himself, and was for the moment lifted above the ordinary rank of humanity. Some feeling of the same kind must have originally suggested similar means for the protection of children under the age of puberty. They also wore the toga praetexta, which, though associated by us with secular magistrates, had undoubtedly a religious origin. There are distinct signs that children were in some sense sacred, and at the same time that they needed special protection against the all-abounding evil influences to be met with in daily life.123 Thus this particular form of amulet became a recognised institution of family life, and in due time little more than a mark of childhood.

Yet another kind of charm must be mentioned here which was used at certain festivals, though apparently not at any of those belonging to the authorised calendar. At the Compitalia, Paganalia, and feriae Latinae we are told that small images of the human figure, or masks, or simply round balls (pilae), were hung up on trees or doorways, and left to swing in the wind.124 At the Compitalia the images had a special name, maniae, of which the meaning is lost; but inasmuch as the charms were hung up at cross-roads on that occasion, where the Lares compitales of the various properties had their shrine, it was not difficult to manufacture out of them a goddess, Mania, mother of the Lares.125 The common word for these figures was oscilla, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb oscillare, which survives in our own tongue with the same meaning. Until lately it used to be believed that they were substitutes for original human sacrifices: a view for which there is not a particle of evidence, though it was originated by Roman scholars.126 Modern anthropology has found another explanation, which is by no means improbable. Dr. Frazer, in an appendix to the 2nd volume of the Golden Bough, has collected a number of examples of the practice of swinging by human beings as a magical rite; they come from many parts of the world, including ancient Athens, and even modern Calabria. He also points out that at the feriae Latinae the swingers seem to have been human beings, if we accept the evidence of Festus, s.v. "oscillantes"; thus we are left with the possibility that the oscilla were really imitations of men and women, though not of human sacrificial victims.

Dr. Frazer is obviously hard put to it to explain the original meaning and object of this curious custom. In the Paganalia, as described by Virgil in the second Georgic,127 the object would seem to be the prosperity of the vine-crop.

But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and that the oscilla, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops. I am not disposed to put any confidence in what Servius tells us, that this was a purification by means of air, just as fire and water were also purifying agents; this looks like the ingenious explanation of a later and a religious age.129

So much, then, for magical charms and spells, and the survivals of them in the fully developed Roman religion.130 It might seem hardly worth while to spend even so much time on them as I have done, and I cannot deny that I am glad now to be able to leave them. My object has simply been to show how little of this kind of practice, which meets us on the threshold of religion, was allowed to survive by the religious authorities of the State; in other words, I wished to make clear that in our inquiries into the nature of the Roman religion it is really religion and not magic that we have to do with.

It is really religion; it is desire, beginning already to be effective, to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The Romans, as I hope to show in the next lecture, when we can begin to know and feel an interest in them, had not only begun to recognise this Power in various forms and functions as one that must be propitiated, because they were dependent on it for their daily needs, but to regulate and make permanent the methods of propitiation. What was the relation between this simple religion and morality—between ritual and conduct—is a very difficult question, to which I shall return later on. Dr. Westermarck has recently come to the conclusion that the religion of primitive man has no true relation to morality, that it is not apt to give a sanction to good action, or to develop the germs of a conscience. But so far as I can discern, the idea of active duty, and therefore the germ of conscience, must have been so intimately connected with the religious practice of the old Latin family that it is to me impossible to think of the one apart from the other. Surely it is in that life that the famous word "pius" must have originated, which throughout Roman history meant the sense of duty towards family, State, and gods, as every reader of the Aeneid knows. That the formalised religion of later times had become almost entirely divorced from morality there is indeed no doubt; but in the earliest times, in the old Roman family and then in the budding State, the whole life of the Roman seems to me so inextricably bound up with his religion that I cannot possibly see how that religion can have been distinguishable from his simple idea of duty and discipline.

NOTES TO LECTURE III

LECTURE IV

THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY

Some of the survivals mentioned in the last two lectures seem to carry us back to a condition of culture anterior to the family and to the final settlement on the land. Some attempt has recently been made to discover traces of descent by the mother in early Latium;131 if this could be proved, it would mean that the Latins were already in Latium before they had fully developed the patriarchal system on which the family is based. However this may be, the first real fact that meets us in the religious experience of the Romans is the attitude towards the supernatural, or "the Power that manifests itself in the Universe," of the family as settled down upon the land. The study of religion in the family, as we know it in historical times, is also that of the earliest organisation of religion, and of the most permanent type of ancient Italian religious thought. Aust, whose book on the Roman religion is the most masterly sketch of the subject as yet published, writes thus of this religion of the family:132 "Here the limits of religion and superstition vanish ... and in vain we seek here for the boundary marks of various epochs." By the first of these propositions he means that the State has not here been at work, framing a ius divinum, including religion and excluding magic; in the family, magic of all kinds would be admissible alongside of the daily worship of the family deities, and thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State. Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into its worship:133 new deities do not find their way in—the family experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such degree as to affect its vitality.134

But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe (populus) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, gentes, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.135 According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the patria potestas of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion, as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or unnaturalness of death.136 In regard to the kinship of a clan, death at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.

Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the process, whether or no it has smaller divisions within it. We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die.137 Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.

It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the gens comprising the living descendants of a living ancestor, whether of two, three, or even four generations.138 This union, clearly visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other, and is known by the word familia. This famous word, so far as we know, does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,139 and is therefore essentially das Hauswesen, the house itself, with the persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much thought about the past, or indeed about the future; for it, sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it, exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word pagus.140 Before I go on to describe the religion of the family, it is necessary to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.

The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary, not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium. Vicus, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the Greek οἶκοϛ, a house; later it is used for houses standing together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning its own cattle.141 The question of the amount and the tenure of the land of this group is a very difficult one, into which it is not necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (heredium), and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in common—centuriatus ager; whether the ownership of this was vested in the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly matter for our purposes.142 Lastly, as it is certain that the familia owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.

We see all this through a mist, and a mist that is not likely ever to lift; but yet the outlines of the picture are clear enough to give us the necessary basis for a study of the religion of the familia. The religious points, if I may use the expression—those points, that is, which are the object of special anxiety (religio)—lie in the boundaries, both of the pagus as a whole, and of the arable land of the familia, in the house itself and its free inhabitants, and in the family burying-place; and to these three may no doubt be added the spring which supplied the household with water. Boundaries, house, burying-place, spring,—all these are in a special sense sacred, and need constant and regular religious care.

Let us begin with the house, the central point of the economic and religious unit. The earliest Italian house was little more than a wigwam, more or less round, constructed of upright posts connected with wattles, and with a closed roof of straw or branches.143 This would seem to have been the type of house of the immigrating people who settled on the tops of hills and lived a pastoral life; when they descended into the plains and became a settled agricultural people, they adopted a more roomy and convenient style of building, suitable for storing their grain or other products, and for the maintenance of a fire for cooking these. Whether the rectangular house, with which alone we are here concerned, was developed under Greek or Etruscan influence, or suggested independently by motives of practical convenience, is matter of dispute, and must be left to archaeologists to decide.144

This is the house in which the Latin family lived throughout historical times, the house which we know as the sacred local habitation of divine and human beings. It consisted in its simplest form, as we all know, of a single room or hall, the atrium, with a roof open in the middle and sloping inwards to let the rain fall into a basin (compluvium). Here the life of the family went on, and here was the hearth (focus), the "natural altar of the dwelling-room of man,"145 and the seat of Vesta, the spirit of the fire, whose aid in the cooking of the food was indispensable in the daily life of the settlers. This sacred hearth was the centre of the family worship of later times, until under Greek influence the arrangement of the house was modified;146 and we may be certain that it was so in the simple farm life of early Latium. In front of it was the table at which the family took their meals, and on this was placed the salt-cellar (salinum), and the sacred salt-cake, baked even in historical times in primitive fashion by the daughters of the family, as in all periods for the State by the Vestal virgins. After the first and chief course of the mid-day meal, silence was enjoined, and an offering of a part of the cake was thrown on to the fire from a small sacrificial plate or dish (patella).147 This alone is enough to prove that Vesta, the spirit of the fire, was the central point of the whole worship, the spiritual embodiment of the physical welfare of the family.

Behind the hearth, i.e. farther at the back of the atrium, was the penus, or storing-place of the household. Penus was explained by the learned Scaevola148 as meaning anything that can be eaten or drunk, but not so much that which is each day set out on the table, as that which is kept in store for daily consumption; it is therefore in origin the food itself, though in later times it became also the receptacle in which that food was stored. This store was inhabited or guarded by spirits, the di penates, who together with Vesta represent the material vitality of the family; these spirits, always conceived and expressed in the plural, form a group in a way which is characteristic of the Latins, and their plurality is perhaps due to the variety and frequent change of the material of the store. The religious character of the store is also well shown by the fact, if such it be, that no impure person was allowed to meddle with it; the duty was especially that of the children of the family,149 whose purity and religious capability was symbolised throughout Roman history by the purple-striped toga which they wore, and secured also by the amulet, within its capsule the bulla, of which I spoke in the last lecture.

Vesta and the Penates represent the spiritual side of the material needs of the household; but there was another divine inhabitant of the house, the Genius of the paterfamilias, who was more immediately concerned with the continuity of the family. Analogy with the worldwide belief in the spiritual double of a man, his "other-soul," compels us to think of this Genius, who accompanied the Latin from the cradle to the grave, as originally a conception of this kind. The Latins had indeed, in common with other races, what we may call the breath-idea of the soul, as we see from the words animus and anima, and also the shadow-idea, as is proved by the word umbra for a departed spirit. But the Genius was one of those guardian spirits, treated by Professor Tylor as a different species of the same genus, which accompany a man all his life and help him through its many changes and chances;150 and the peculiarity of this Latin guardian is that he was specially helpful in continuing the life of the family. The soul of a man is often conceived as the cause of life, but not often as the procreative power itself; and that this latter was the Latin idea is certain, both from the etymology of the word and from the fact that the marriage-bed was called lectus genialis. I am inclined to think that this peculiarity of the Latin conception of Genius was the result of the unusually strong idea that the Latins must have had, even when they first passed into Italy, of kinship as determined not by the mother but by the father.151 It is possible, I think, that the Genius was a soul of later origin than those I have just mentioned, and developed in the period when the gens arose as the main group of kinsmen real or imaginary. I would suggest that we may see in it the connecting link between that group and the individual adult males within it; in that case the Genius would be that soul of a man which enables him to fulfil the work of continuing the life of the gens. We can easily imagine how it might eventually come to be his guardian spirit, and to acquire all the other senses with which we are familiar in Roman literature. With the development of the idea of individuality, the individuality of a man as apart from the kin group, the idea of the individuality of the Genius also became emphasised, until it became possible to think of it as even living on after the death of its companion;152 in this way, in course of time, the Genius came to exercise a curious influence on the idea of the Manes. The history of the idea of Genius, and its application to places, cities, etc., is indeed a curious one, and of no small interest in the study of religion; but we must return to the primitive house and its divine inhabitants. There is one more of these who calls for a word before I pass to the land and the boundaries; we meet him on the threshold as we leave the dwelling.

It is, of course, well known to anthropologists that the door of a house is a dangerous point, because evil spirits or the ghosts of the dead may gain access to the house through it. Among the innumerable customs which attest this belief there are one or two Roman ones, e.g. the practice of making a man, who has returned home after his supposed death in a foreign country, enter the house by the roof instead of the door; for the door must be kept barred against ghosts, and this man may be after all a ghost, or at least he may have evil spirits or miasma about him.153 It was at the doorway that a curious ceremony took place (to which I shall ask your attention again) immediately after the birth of a child, in order to prevent Silvanus, who may stand for the dangerous spirits of the forest, from entering in and vexing the baby.154 Again, a dead man, as among so many other peoples, was carried out of the doorway with his feet foremost, so that he should not find his way back; and the old Roman practice of burial by night probably had the same object.155 Exactly the same anxiety (religio) is seen in regard to the gates of a city; the wall was in some sense holy (sanctus), but the gates, through which was destined to pass much that might be dangerous, could not be thus sanctified. Was there, then, no protecting spirit of these doors and gates?

St. Augustine, writing with Varro before him, finds no less than three spirits of the entrance to a house: Forculus, of the door itself; Limentinus, of the threshold; and Cardea, of the hinges of the door; and these Varro seems to have found in the books of the pontifices.156 I must postpone the question as to what these pontifical books really represented; but the passage will at least serve to show us the popular anxiety about the point of entrance to a house, and its association with the spirit world. Of late sober research has reached the conclusion that the original door-spirit was Janus, whom we know in Roman history as residing in the symbolic gate of the Forum, and as the god of beginnings, the first deity to be invoked in prayer, as Vesta was the last.157 But Janus is also wanted for far higher purposes by some eminent Cambridge scholars; they have their own reasons for wanting him as a god of the sky, as a double of Jupiter, as the mate of Diana, and a deity of the oak.158 So, too, he was wanted by the philosophical speculators of the last century b.c., who tried to interpret their own humble deities in terms of Greek philosophy and Greek polytheism. The poets too, who, as Augustine says, found Forculus and his companions beneath their notice, played strange tricks with this hoary old god, as any one may read in the first book of Ovid's Fasti. I myself believe that the main features of the theology (if we may use the word) of the earliest Rome were derived from the house and the land as an economic and religious unit, and I am strongly inclined to see in Janus bifrons of the Forum a developed form of the spirit of the house-door; but the question is a difficult one, and I shall return to it in a lecture on the deities of early Rome.

So far I have said nothing of the Lar familiaris who has become a household word as a household deity; and yet we are on the point of leaving the house of the old Latin settler to look for the spirits whom he worships on his land. The reason is simply that after repeated examination of the evidence available, I find myself forced to believe that at the period of which I am speaking the Lar was not one of the divine inhabitants of the house. When Fustel de Coulanges wrote his brilliant book La Cité antique, which popularised the importance of the worship of ancestors as a factor in Aryan civilisation, he found in the Lar, who in historical times was a familiar figure in the house, the reputed founder of the family; and until lately this view has been undisputed. But if my account of the relation of the family to the gens is correct, the family would stand in no need of a reputed founder; that symbol of the bond of kinship was to be found in the gens of which the family was an offshoot, a cutting, as it were, planted on the land. Still more convincing is the fact that when we first meet with the Lar as an object of worship he is not in the house but on the land. The oldest Lar of whom we know anything was one of a characteristic Roman group of which the individuals lived in the compita, i.e. the spots where the land belonging to various households met, and where there were chapels with as many faces as there were properties, each face containing an altar to a Lar,—the presiding spirit of that allotment, or rather perhaps of the whole of the land of the familia, including that on which the house stood.159 Thus the Lar fills a place in the private worship which would otherwise be vacant, that of the holding and its productive power. In this sense, too, we find the Lares in the hymn of the Arval Brethren, one of the oldest fragments of Latin we possess; for the spirits of the land would naturally be invoked in the lustration of the ager Romanus by this ancient religious gild.160

But how, it may be asked, did the Lar find his way into the house, to become the characteristic deity of the later Roman private worship there? I believe that he gained admittance through the slaves of the familia, who had no part in the worship of the dwelling, but were admitted to the Compitalia, or yearly festival of which the Lares of the compita were the central object. Cato tells us that the vilicus, the head of the familia of slaves, might not "facere rem divinam nisi Compitalibus in compito aut in foco";161 which I take to mean that he might sacrifice for his fellow-slaves to the Lar at the compitum, or to the Lar in the house, if the Lar were already transferred from the compitum to the house. In the constant absence of the owner, the paterfamilias of Rome's stirring days, the worship of the Lar at the compitum or in the house came to be more and more distinctly the right of the vilicus and his wife as representing the slaves, and thus too the Lar came to be called by the epithet familiaris, which plainly indicates that in his cult the slaves were included. And as it was the old custom that the slaves should sit at the meals of the family on benches below the free members (subsellia),162 what more natural than that they should claim to see there the Lar whom alone of the deities of the farm they were permitted to worship, and that they should bring the Lar or his double from the compitum to the house, in the frequent absence of the master?163

The festival of the Lar was celebrated at the compitum, and known as Compitalia or Laralia; it took place soon after the winter solstice, on a day fixed by the paterfamilias, in concert, no doubt, with the other heads of families in the pagus. Like most rejoicings at this time of year, it was free and jovial in character, and the whole familia took part in it, both bond and free. Each familia sacrificed on its own altar, which was placed fifteen feet in front of the compitum, so that the worshippers might be on their own land; but if, as we may suppose, the whole pagus celebrated this rite on the same day, there was in this festival, as in others to be mentioned directly, a social value, a means of widening the outlook of the familia and associating it with the needs of others in its religious duties. This is the religio Larium of which Cicero speaks in the second book of his de Legibus, which was "posita in fundi villaeque conspectu," and handed down for the benefit both of masters and men from remote antiquity.164

There were other festivals in which all the familiae of a pagus took part. Of these we know little, and what we do know is almost entirely due to the love of the Augustan poets for the country and its life and customs; "Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes," wrote Virgil, contrasting himself with the philosopher poet whom he revered. Varro, in his list of Roman festivals,165 just mentions a festival called Sementivae, associated with the sowing of the seed, and celebrated by all pagi, if we interpret him rightly; but Ovid has given us a charming picture of what must be this same rite, and places it clearly in winter, after the autumn sowing166:—

Ovid may here be writing of his own home at Sulmo, and what took place there in the Augustan age; but we may read his description into the life of old Latium, for rustic life is tenacious of old custom, especially where the economic conditions remain always the same. We may do the same with another beautiful picture left us by Tibullus, also a poet of the country, which I have recently examined at length in the Classical Review.167 The festival he describes has often been identified with Ovid's, but I am rather disposed to see in it a lustratio of the ager paganus in the spring, of the same kind as the famous one in Virgil's first Georgic, to be mentioned directly; for Tibullus, after describing the scene, which he introduces with the words "fruges lustramus et agros," puts into perfect verse a prayer for the welfare of the crops and flocks, and looks forward to a time when (if the prayer succeeds) the land shall be full of corn, and the peasant shall heap wood upon a bonfire—perhaps one of the midsummer fires that still survive in the Abruzzi. Virgil's lines are no less picturesque;168 and though he does not mention the pagus, he is clearly thinking of a lustratio in which more than one familia takes part—

This is a spring festival "extremae sub casum hiemis, iam vere sereno"; and I shall return to it when we come to deal with the processional lustratio of the farm. Like the descriptions of Ovid and Tibullus, it is more valuable to us for the idea it gives us of the spirit of old Italian agricultural religion than for exact knowledge about dates and details. There was, of course, endless variety in Italy in both these; and it is waste of time to try and make the descriptions of the rural poets fit in with the fixed festivals of the Roman city calendar.

Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another festa of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their cattle in the summer;169 by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,170 who on the Nones of December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding peacefully on the winter pasture:—

There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety—a matter in which the feeling of anxiety and awe (religio) brought with it, to use an expression of Cicero's, both cura and caerimonia.171 The religio terminorum is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical times, from the Roman writers on agrimetatio; and with their help the whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume of the Gromatici.172 We know that many different objects might serve as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees and stones; and in the case of the latter, which would be the usual termini in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and carefully fixed."173 This had the practical effect—for all Latin religion has a practical side—of enabling the stone to be identified in the future. But Ovid174 gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the religio terminorum. The boundary-stone is garlanded, and an altar is built; the fire is carried from the hearth of the homestead by a materfamilias, the priestess of the family; a young son of the family holds a basket full of fruits of the earth, and a little daughter shakes these into the fire and offers honey-cakes. Others stand by with wine, or look on in silence, clothed in white. The victims are lamb and sucking-pig, and the stone is sprinkled with their blood, an act which all the world over shows that an object is holy and tenanted by a spirit.175 And the ceremony ends with a feast and hymns in honour of holy Terminus, who in Ovid's time in the rural districts, and long before on the Capitolium of Rome, had risen from the spirit sanctifying the stone to become a deity, closely connected with Jupiter himself, and to give his name to a yearly city festival on February 23.

These festivals on the land were, some of them at least, scenes of revelry, accompanied with dancing and singing, as the poets describe them, the faces of the peasants painted red with minium,176 according to an old Italian custom which survived in the case of the triumphator of the glorious days of the City-state. But if we may now return for a moment to the homestead, there were events of great importance to the family which were celebrated there in more serious and sober fashion, with rites that were in part truly religious, yet not without some features that show the prevailing anxiety, rooted in the age of taboo, which we learnt to recognise under the word religio. Marriage was a religious ceremony, for we can hardly doubt that the patrician confarreatio, in which a cake made of the anciently used grain called far was offered to Jupiter, and perhaps partaken of sacramentally by bride and bridegroom, was the oldest form of marriage, and had its origin in an age before the State came into being. We must remember that the house was a sacred place, with religious duties carried on within it, and the abode of household spirits; and when a bride from another family or gens was to be brought into it, it was essential that such introduction should be carried out in a manner that would not disturb the happy relations of the human and divine inhabitants of the house. It was essential, too, that the children expected of her should be such as should be able to discharge their duties in the household without hurting the feelings of these spirits. Some of the quaint customs of the deductio of later times strongly suggest an original anxiety about matters of such vital interest; the torch, carried by a boy whose parents were both living, was of whitethorn (Spina alba), which was a powerful protective against hostile magic, and about which there were curious superstitions.177 Arrived at the house, the bride smeared the doorposts with wolf's fat and oil, and wound fillets of wool around them—so dangerous was the moment of entrance, so sacred the doorway; and finally, she was carried over the threshold, and then, and then only, was received by her husband into communion of fire and water, symbolic of her acceptance as materfamilias both by man and deity.178

When the new materfamilias presented her husband with a child, there was another perilous moment; the infant, if accepted by the father (sublatus, i.e. raised from the earth on which it had been placed),179 did not immediately become a member of the family in the religious sense, and was liable to be vexed by evil or mischievous spirits from the wild woodland, or, as they phrased it in later days, by Silvanus. I have already alluded to the curious bit of mummery which was meant to keep them off. Three men at night came to the threshold and struck it with an axe, a pestle, and a besom, so that "by these signs of agriculture Silvanus might be prevented from entering." The hostile spirits were thus denied entrance to a dwelling in which friendly spirits of household life and of settled agricultural pursuits had taken up their abode. Nothing can better show the anxiety of life in those primitive times, especially in a country like Italy, full of forest and mountain, where dwelt mischievous Brownies who would tease the settler if they could. But on the ninth day after the birth (or the eighth in the case of a girl) the child was "purified" and adopted into the family and its sacra, and into the gens to which the family belonged, and received its name—the latter a matter of more importance than we can easily realise.180 From this time till it arrived at the age of puberty it was protected by amulet and praetexta; the tender age of childhood being then passed, and youth and maiden endued with new powers, the peculiar defensive armour of childhood might be dispensed with.181

Lastly, the death of a member of the family was an occasion of extreme anxiety, which might, however, be allayed by the exact performance of certain rites (iusta facere). The funeral ceremonies of the City-state were of a complicated character, and the details are not all of them easy to interpret. But the principle must have been always the same—that the dead would "walk" unless they had been deposited with due ceremony in the bosom of Mother Earth, and that their natural tendency in "walking" was to find their way back to the house which had been their home in life. Whether buried or burnt, the idea was the same: if burnt, as seems to have been common Roman practice from very early times, at least one bone had to be buried as representing the whole body. We have seen that certain precautions were taken to prevent the dead man from finding his way back, such as carrying him out of the house feet foremost; and if he were properly buried and the house duly purified afterwards, the process of prevention was fairly complete. His ghost, shade, or double then passed beneath the earth to join the whole body of Manes in the underworld,182 and could only return at certain fixed times—such at least was the idea expressed in the customs of later ages. But if a paterfamilias or his representative had omitted iusta facere, or if the dead man had never been buried at all, carried off by an enemy or some wild beast, he could never have descended to that underworld, and was roaming the earth disconsolately, and with an evil will. The primitive idea of anxiety is well expressed in the Roman festival of the Lemuria in May, when the head of a household could get rid of the ghosts by spitting out black beans183 from his mouth and saying, "With these I redeem me and mine." Nine times he says this without looking round: then come the ghosts behind him and gather up the beans unseen. After other quaint performances he nine times repeats the formula, "Manes exite paterni," then at last looks round, and the ghosts are gone.184 This is plainly a survival from the private life of the primitive household, and well illustrates its fears and anxieties; but the State provided, as we shall see, another and more religious ceremony, put limitations on the mischievous freedom of the ghosts, and ordained the means of expiation for those who had made a slip in the funeral ceremonies, or whose dead had been buried at sea or had died in a far country.

I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe. We have seen enough, I think, to conclude that it had a strong desire to be in right relations with that Power, and to understand its will; but we may doubt whether that desire had as yet become very effective. The circumstances of the life of the Latin farmer were hardly such as to rid him of much of the religio that he had inherited from his wilder ancestors, or had found springing up afresh within him as he contended with the soil, the elements, and the hostile beings surrounding him, animal, human, and spiritual. He is living in an age of transition; he is half-way between the age of magic and a new age of religion and duty.

NOTES TO LECTURE IV

LECTURE V

THE CALENDAR OF NUMA

The religion of the household had two main characteristics. First, it was a perfectly natural and organic growth, the result of the Roman farmer's effective desire to put himself and his in right relations with the spiritual powers at work for good or ill around him. His conception of these powers I shall deal with more fully in the next lecture; but I have said enough to prove that it was not a degrading one. The spirits of his house and his land and his own Genius were friendly powers, all of them of the greatest importance for his life and his work, and their claims were attended to with regularity and devotion. From Vesta and the Penates, the Lar, the Genius, the Manes, and the spirits of the doorway and the spring, there was nothing to fear if they were carefully propitiated; and as his daily life and comfort depended on this propitiation, they were really divine members of the familia, and might become, and perhaps did become, the objects of real affection as well as worship. In this well-regulated practical life of the early agricultural settlers, with its careful attention to the claims of its divine protectors, we may perhaps see the germs of a real religious expression of human life.

Secondly, there was doubtless at the same time constant cause for anxiety. Beyond the house and the land there were unreclaimed spirits of the woodland which might force an entrance into the sacred limits of the house; the ghosts of the dead members were constantly wishing to return; the crops might be attacked by strange diseases, by storms or drought, and man himself was liable to seasonal disease or sudden pestilence. The cattle and sheep might stray into the remote forest and become the prey of evil beasts, if not of evil spirits. How was the farmer to meet all these troubles, caused, as he supposed, by spirits whose ways he did not understand? How were they to be propitiated as they themselves would wish? How were the omens to be interpreted from which their will might be guessed? How were the proper times and seasons for each religious operation to be discovered? If my imagination is not at fault, I seem to see that the Latin farmer must have had to shift for himself in most of his dealings with the supernatural powers about him; religio, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull religio to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take place in early Roman history.

For we now have to leave the religion of the household, and to study that of the earliest form of the City-state. We have enjoyed a glint of light reflected from later times on the religion of the early Roman family, and are about to enjoy another glint—nay, a gleam of real light, and not merely a reflected one—which the earliest religious document we possess casts on the religion of the City-state of Rome. Between the two there is a long period of almost complete darkness. We know hardly anything as yet, and it is not likely that we shall ever know anything definite, about the stages of development which must have been passed before Rome became the so-called city of the Four Regions, when her history may be said really to begin. The pagus hardly helps us here; it was not an essential advance on the family, and its religion was comprehensive, not intensive. Each pagus, however, seems to have had within its bounds an oppidum, or stronghold on a hill; and such oppida were the seven montes of early Rome, which, with the pagi belonging to them, survived in name to the end of the Republic, with some kind of a religious festival uniting them together, about which we have hardly any knowledge.185 This looks like a stage in the process of change from farm to city, and it has generally been believed to mark one. Unfortunately nothing to our purpose can be founded on it. We must be content with the undoubted fact that about the eighth or seventh century b.c. the site of Rome was occupied and strengthened as a bulwark against the Etruscan people who were pressing down from the north upon the valley of the Tiber;186 we may take it that the old central fortress of Latium, on the Alban hill, was not in the right position for defence, and that it was seen to be absolutely necessary to make a stronghold of the position offered by the hills which abut on the river twenty miles above its mouth—the only real position of defence for the Latin settlements in its rear. Here an urbs was made with murus and pomoerium, i.e. material and spiritual boundaries, taking in a space sufficient to hold the threatened rural population with their flocks and herds, with the river in the front and a common citadel on the Capitoline hill, and including the Palatine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills, though the last named remained technically outside the pomoerium.187

It is to this city that our earliest religious document, the so-called Calendar of Numa, belongs. That calendar includes the cult of Quirinus on the hill which still bears his name, and that hill was an integral part of the city as just described. On the other hand, it tells us nothing of the great cult of the trias on the Capitoline—Jupiter, Juno, Minerva—which by universal tradition was instituted much later by the second Tarquinius, i.e. under an Etruscan dynasty; nor does Diana appear in it, the goddess who was brought from Latium and settled on the Aventine before the end of the kingly period. We have, then, a terminus ex quo for the date of the calendar in the inclusion in the city of the Quirinal hill, and a terminus ad quem in the foundation of the Diana temple on the Aventine.188 We cannot date these events precisely; but it is sufficient for our purpose if it be taken as proved that the Fasti belong to the fully developed city, and yet were drawn up before that conquest by the Etruscans which we may regard as a certainty, and which is marked by the foundations of Etruscan masonry which served to support the great Capitoline temple. And this is also borne out by the undoubted fact that the calendar itself shows no trace of Etruscan influence. But I must now go on to explain exactly what this calendar is.

The Fasti anni Romani exist chiefly on stone as inscriptions, and date from the Early Empire, between 31 b.c. and a.d. 51. They give us, in fact, the calendar as revised by Caesar; but no one now doubts that Mommsen was right in detecting in these inscriptions the skeleton of the original calendar which the Romans ascribed to Numa.189 This is distinguished from later additions by the large capital letters in which it is written or inscribed in all the fragments we possess; it gives us the days of the month with their religious characteristics as affecting state business, the names of the religious festivals which concern the whole state, and the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month. Excluding these last, we have the names, in a shortened form, of forty-five festivals; and these festivals, thus placed by an absolutely certain record in their right place in each month and in the year, must be the foundation of all scientific study of the religious practice of the Roman state, taken together with certain additions in smaller capitals, and with such information about them as we can obtain from literary sources.190

The smaller capitals give us such entries as feriae Iovi, feriae Saturno, i.e. the name of a deity to whom a festival was sacred, the foundation days of temples, generally with the name of the deity in the dative and the position of the temple in the city, and certain ludi and memorial days, which belong to a much later age than the original festivals. But the names of those which are inscribed in large letters bear witness beyond all question to their own antiquity; for among them there is not one which has anything to do, so far as we know, with a non-Roman deity, and we know that foreign deities began to arrive in Rome before the end of the kingly period. Here, then, we have genuine information about the oldest religious doings of the City-state, in what indeed is, as Mommsen said, the most ancient source of our knowledge about Roman antiquity generally.

The first point we notice in studying this calendar (putting aside for the present the question as to the agency by which it was drawn up) is this: it exactly reflects a transition from the life of a rural population engaged in agriculture, to the highly-organised political and military life of a City-state. In other words, the State, whose religious needs and experience it reflects, was one whose economic basis was agriculture, whose life included legal and political business, and whose activity in the season of arms was war.

This last characteristic is discernible chiefly, if not entirely, in the months of March and October; and the former of these bears the name of the great deity, who, whatever may have been his origin or the earliest conception of him, was throughout Roman history the god of war. All through March up to the 23rd the Salii, the warlike priests of Mars, were active, dancing and singing those hymns of which an obscure fragment has come down to us, and clashing and brandishing the sacred spears and shields of the god (ancilia).191 On the 19th these ancilia were lustrated—a process to which I shall recur in another lecture; and on the 23rd we find in the calendar the festival Tubilustrium, which suggests the lustration of the trumpets of the host before it took the field. On the 14th of March,192 and also on the 27th of February, we find Equirria in the calendar, which must be understood as lustrations of the horses of the host, accompanied with races. If we may take the ancilia as symbolising the arms of the host, we see in the festivals of this month a complete religious process preparing the material of war for the perils inevitably to be met with beyond the ager Romanus, whether from human or spiritual enemies; and that the warriors themselves were subjected to a process of the same kind we know from the historical evidence of later times.193 Now in October, when the season of arms was over, we find indications of a parallel process, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but without fully recognising its religious import.194 It was not so much thanksgiving (Dankfest) after a campaign that was necessary on the return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and spiritual.195 On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these days of October, and on the day of the Armilustrium, as it would seem, put their shields away (condere) in their sacrarium until the March following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic copy of the procedure of war.196 From these indications in the calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious calendar.

The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the division of the days of the year into two great groups, dies fasti and nefasti: the former are those on which it is fas, i.e. religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on which it would be nefas to do so, i.e. sacrilege, because they are given over to the gods. We need not, indeed, assume that these marks F and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations. The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread superstition, and we do not need to have recourse to Pythagoras to explain it; in this rule, as in others, e.g. their taboo on eating beans, the Pythagoreans were only following a native prejudice of southern Italy. "The idea of luck in odd numbers," says Mr. Crooke,197 writing of the Hindus, "is universal." Thus the simpler odd numbers, three, five, seven, and nine, all recur constantly in folklore; and the result is visible in this calendar. Where a festival occupies more than one day in a month, there is an interval between the two of one or three days, making the whole number three or five. Thus Carmentalia occur on 11th and 15th January, and the Lemuria in May are on the 9th, 11th, and 13th; the Lucaria in July on 19th and 21st. In some months, too, e.g. August and December, perhaps also July and February, there seem to be traces of an arrangement by which festivals which probably had some connection with each other are thus arranged; e.g. in August six festivals, all concerned in some way with the fruits of the earth and the harvest, occur on the 17th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, and 27th. It has recently been suggested198 that these are arranged round one central festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the Volcanalia in August, the Saturnalia in December. But the reasons von Domaszewski gives for the arrangement, and the further speculation that where it does not occur we may find traces of an older system, as yet unaffected by the so-called Pythagorean prejudice, do not seem to me satisfactory. We may be content with the general principle as I have stated it, and note that while religious duties must be performed on days of odd number, civil duties were not so restricted: the days belonging to the gods, which were, so to speak, taboo days, were more important than those belonging to men. There are, as I have said, but two days marked in the large letters as festivals, which are on days of even number, 24th February and 14th March, the Regifugium and the second Equirria; and about these we know so little that it is almost useless to speculate as to the reason for their exception from the rule. Two others, 24th March and 24th May, were partly the property of the gods and partly of men, and are marked QRCF (quando rex comitiavit fas); but the sense in which they partially belonged to the gods is not the same as in the case of sacrificial festivals.

This calendar thus shows obvious signs of both military and political development; in other words, its witness to the religious experience of the Romans proves that they had successfully adjusted the forms and seasons of their worship to the processes of government at home and of military service in the field. But the most conspicuous feature in it is the testimony it bears to the agricultural habits of the people—to the fact that agriculture and not trade, of which there is hardly a trace, was the economic basis of their life. At the time when it was drawn up, the Romans must have been able to subsist upon the ager Romanus, though, as we shall see later on, it was probably not long before they began commercial relations with other peoples; for their food, which was almost entirely vegetarian, and their clothing, which was entirely of wool and leather,199 they depended on their crops, flocks, and herds; and the perils to which these were liable remain for the State, as for the farming household, the main subject of the propitiation of the gods, the main object of their endeavours to keep themselves in right relation with the Power manifest in the universe.

We can trace the series of agricultural operations in the calendar without much difficulty all through the year. The Roman year, we must remember, began with March, and March, as we have seen, had under the military necessities of the State become peculiarly appropriated to the religious preparation of the burgher host for warlike activity. But the festivals of April, when crops were growing, cattle bringing forth young or seeking summer pasture, all have direct reference to the work of agriculture.200 At the Fordicidia, on the 15th, pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, and their unborn calves burnt, apparently with the object of procuring the fertility of the corn; and the Cerealia on the 19th, to judge by the name, must have had an object of the same kind, though the supersession of Ceres by the Greek Demeter had obscured this in historical times. The Parilia on the 19th, recently illuminated by Dr. Frazer,201 was a lustration of the cattle and sheep before they left their winter pasture to encounter the dangers of wilder hill or woodland, and may be compared with the lustratio of the host before a campaign. On the 23rd the Vinalia tells its own tale, and shows that the cultivation of the vine was already a part of the agricultural work. On the 25th the spirit of the red mildew, Robigus, was the object of propitiation, at the time when the ear was beginning to be formed in the corn, and was particularly liable to attack from this pest.