ROMAN PEOPLE (continued 4)

I will sum up this part of the discussion by translating an admirable passage in Aust's book on the Roman religion, with which I am in cordial agreement322:—

"The deities of Rome were deities of the cult only. They had no human form; they had not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They had no intercourse with each other, and no common or permanent residence; they enjoyed no nectar and ambrosia ... they had no children, no parental relation. They were indeed both male and female, and a male and female deity are often in close relations with each other; but this is not a relation of marriage, and rests only on a similarity in the sphere of their operations.... These deities never become independent existences; they remain cold, colourless conceptions, numina as the Romans called them, that is, supernatural beings whose existence only betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers."

They were, indeed, cold and colourless conceptions as compared with the Greek gods of Olympus, whose warmth and colour is really that of human life, of human passions; but the one remarkable and interesting thing about these Roman and Italian numina is the life and force for good or evil which is the very essence of their being. The puzzling combinations we have just been studying are quite enough to illustrate this character. Moles, Virites, Nerio, and perhaps others too, seem to mean the strength or force inherent in the numen; Cerfius, or Cerus, as the Latins called it, Liber, Genius, all are best interpreted as meaning a functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.

We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.

In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice to lay particular stress upon an immense number of "gods," as they used to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the grave—from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.

We know of them mainly, but not entirely, from Tertullian, and the de Civitate Dei of St. Augustine.323 These scholarly theologians, wishing to show up the absurdity of the heathen religions, found a mine of material in the great work of Varro on the Roman religious antiquities; and though they found him by no means so elegant a writer as Cicero, they studied him with pains, and have incidentally added immensely to our knowledge both of Varro himself and of the Roman religion. St. Augustine tells us that it was in the last three books of his work that Varro treated of the Roman deities, and that he divided them under the heads of di certi, di incerti, and di selecti. In the first of these he dealt chiefly with those with which we are now concerned: they were certi because their names expressed their supposed activity quite clearly.324 We know for certain that Varro found these names in the books of the pontifices, and that they were there called Indigitamenta:325 a word which has been variously interpreted, and has been the subject of much learned disputation. I believe with Wissowa that it means "forms of invocation," i.e. the correct names by which gods should be addressed.

Thus these lists of names come down to us at third hand: Varro took them from the pontifical books, and the Christian fathers took them from Varro. It is obvious that this being the case they need very careful critical examination; and till recently they were accepted in full without hesitation, and without reflection on such questions as, e.g., whether they are psychologically probable, or whether they can be paralleled from the religious experience of other peoples. Some preliminary critical attempts were made about fifty years ago in this direction,326 but the first thoroughgoing examination of the subject was published by R. Peter in the article "Indigitamenta" in Roscher's Mythological Lexicon. This most industrious scholar, though his interpretation of the word Indigitamenta is probably erroneous,327 was the first to reach the definite conclusion that the lists are not really primitive, and do not, as we have them, represent primitive religious thought. It was after a very careful study of this article, which is long enough to fill a small volume, that I wrote in my Roman Festivals of the Indigitamenta as "based on"—not actually representing, I might have added—"old ideas of divine agency, now systematised by something like scientific terminology and ordered classification by skilled legal theologians"; and as "an artificial priestly exaggeration of a primitive tendency to see a world of nameless spirits surrounding and influencing all human life."328

I was not then specially concerned with the Indigitamenta, and only alluded to them in passing. But before my book was published there had already appeared a most interesting work on the names of deities (Götternamen) by H. Usener, a brilliant investigator, which drew fresh attention to the subject. Usener found in mediaeval records of the religion of the heathen Lithuanians what seemed to be a remarkable parallel with this old Roman theology, and he also compared these records with certain facts in what we may call the pre-Olympian religious ideas of the Greeks. "The conclusion which he draws," writes Dr. Farnell329—and I cannot state it better—"is that the Indo-Germanic peoples, on the way to the higher polytheism, passed through an earlier stage when the objects of cult were beings whom he designated by the newly-coined words 'Augenblickgötter' and 'Sondergötter'" (gods of momentary or limited function). He went further than this, and claimed that the anthropomorphic gods of Greece and Italy, of the Indo-Iranians, Persians, and Slavs, were developed out of these spirits presiding over special functions and particular moments of human life; but with this latter part of his theory I am not now concerned. What we want to know now is whether in writing thus of the Roman Indigitamenta Usener was using a record which really represents an early stage of religious thought in Italy; and I may add that we should be glad to know whether his Lithuanian records are also to be unhesitatingly relied on.330 As regards Greece, Dr. Farnell has criticised his theories with considerable effect.

The most recent contribution to the discussion of the Roman part of the subject is that of Wissowa, who in 1904 published a paper on "True and False Sondergötter at Rome";331 this is a piece of most valuable and weighty criticism, but extremely difficult to follow and digest. I here give only the main results of it. Wissowa takes two genuine examples of Sondergötter which have come down to us from other sources, and more directly than those mentioned above: the first from Fabius Pictor, the oldest Roman historian,332 and the other from the Acta Fratrum Arvalium.333 Fabius said that the flamen (Cerealis?), when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres, also invoked the following deities: Vervactor, for the first ploughing, as Wissowa interprets it; Redarator, for the second ploughing; Imporcitor, for the harrowing; Insitor, for the sowing; Oberator, for the top-dressing; Occator, Sarritor, Subrincator, Messor, Convector, Conditor, Promitor, for subsequent operations up to the harvest and actual distribution of the corn for food. Secondly, in the Acta of the Arval Brethren we find, on the occasion of a piaculum caused by the growth of a fig-tree on the roof of the temple of Dea Dia, at the end of a long list of deities invoked, and before the names of the divi of the Imperial families, the names of three Sondergötter, Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda, and on another occasion, Adolenda and Coinquenda; these seem beyond doubt to refer to the process of getting the obnoxious tree down from the roof, of breaking it up, and burning it.

In both these examples, which have come down to us more directly than the lists in the Fathers, Wissowa sees assistant or subordinate deities (if such they can be called) grouped around a central idea, that of the main object of sacrifice in each case;334 these are the result of the cura and caerimonia supervised and over-elaborated by pontifical law and ritual. It is, I may add on my own account, most unlikely, and psychologically almost impossible, that any individual farmer should have troubled himself to remember and enumerate by name twelve deities representing the various stages of an agricultural process; and Cato, in fact, says nothing of such ritual. It was the flamen of the City-state, who, when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres before harvest,335 pictured, or recalled to mind, the various processes of a year of what we may call high farming rather than primitive, under the names of deities plainly invented out of the words which express those processes—words which themselves are certainly not all antique. And in the second example, which dates from the second century a.d., we see that the process of destroying the intruding fig-tree is represented in ritual in exactly the same curious way: the names of the deities, Deferunda and the rest, being invented for the occasion out of the words which express the several acts of the process of destruction. These Arval Brethren of the second century inherited the traditions of their predecessors of an earlier age, and carried out the work of amplification in their invocations by pedantically imitating the pontifices of five or six centuries earlier. They held, in a way which to us is ludicrous, to the old notion that you should try and cover as much ground as possible in worship, and to cover it in detail, so that no chance might be missed of securing the object for which you were taking so much trouble.

Now to return to Varro and his lists of names. What is Dr. Wissowa's conclusion about these, after examining the two examples of Sondergötter which have not come down to us through so much book-learning as the rest?

Varro's di certi, he says336—and I think there is no doubt that he is right—included the name of every deity, great or small, of which he could feel sure that he knew something, as he found it in the books of the pontifices; and the part of those books in which he found these names, known as Indigitamenta, probably contained formulae of invocation, precationum carmina,337 of the same kind as the comprecationes deorum immortalium from which Gellius quoted the pairs of male and female deities which we discussed above. Varro arranged all these names in groups of principal and subordinate or assistant deities, the latter amplifying in detail the meaning and scope of the former, as we have just seen; and of this grouping some traces are still visible in the accounts of Augustine and Tertullian. But the good Fathers tumbled the whole collection about sadly in their search for material for their mockery, having no historical or scientific object in view; with the result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than the divinities themselves.338

But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these Sondergötter of the real kind, such, for example, as those twelve agricultural ones invoked by the flamen at the Cereale sacrum, had their origin in any sense in popular usage or belief. At the end of his paper Wissowa emphatically says that he does not believe it. For myself, I would only modify this conclusion so far as this: they must, I think, have been the theological, or perhaps rather the ritualistic outcome, of a psychological tendency rooted in the popular mind. I have already noticed that curious bit of folklore in which three spirits of cultivation were invoked with a kind of acted parable at the birth of a child;339 and I cannot regard this custom as a piece of pontifical ritualism, though the names may have been invented by the priests to suit the practice. The old Roman seems to have had a tendency to ascribe what for want of a better word we may call divinity, not only to animate and inanimate objects, but to actions and abstractions; this, I take it, is an advanced stage of animism, peculiar, it would seem, to a highly practical agricultural people, and it is this stage which is reflected in the ritualistic work of the priests. They turned dim and nameless powers into definite and prehensible deities with names, and arranged them in groups so as to fall in with the life of the city as well as the farm. What was the result of all this ingenuity, or whether it had any popular result at all, is a question hardly admitting of solution. What is really interesting in the matter, if my view is the right one, is the curious way in which the early Roman seems to have looked upon all life and force and action, human or other, as in some sense associated with, and the result of, divine or spiritual agency.

NOTES TO LECTURE VII

LECTURE VIII

RITUAL OF THE IUS DIVINUM

I have already frequently mentioned the ius divinum, the law governing the relations between the divine and human inhabitants of the city, as the ius civile governed the relations between citizen and citizen.340 When we examined the calendar of Numa, we were in fact examining a part of this law; we began with this our studies of the religion of the Roman city-state, because it is the earliest document we possess which illuminates the dark ages of city life, so far as religion is concerned. The study of the calendar naturally led us on to consider the evidence it yields, taken together with other sources of information, as to the nature of the deities for whose worship it fixes times and seasons, or, more accurately, the amount of knowledge to which the Romans had attained about their divine beings. But we must now return to the ius divinum, and study it in another aspect, for which the calendar itself does not suffice as evidence.

Perhaps the simplest way of explaining this ius is to describe it as laying down the rules for the maintenance of right relations between the citizens and their deities; as ordaining what things are to be done or avoided in order to keep up a continual pax, or quasi-legal covenant, between these two parties. The two words ius and pax, we may note, are continually meeting us in Roman religious documents. In a prayer sanctioned by the pontifices for use at the making of a new clearing, we read: "Si deus, si dea sit cuius illud sacrum est, ut tibi ius siet porco piaculo facere illiusce sacri coercendi ergo,"341 i.e. "O unknown deity, whether god or goddess, whose property this wood is, let it be legally proper to sacrifice to thee this pig as an expiatory offering, for the sake of cutting down trees in this wood of thine." "Pacem deorum exposcere" (or "petere") is a standing formula, as all readers of Virgil know;342 and it occurs in many other authors and religious documents. When Livy wants to express the horror of the old patrician families at the idea of plebeians being consuls—men who had no knowledge of the ius divinum and no right to have any—he makes Appius Claudius exclaim, "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."343 How can we maintain our right relations with the gods, if plebeians have the care of them?

Thus it is not going too far to describe the whole Roman religion of the city-state as a Rechtsverkehr,344 a legal process going on continually. When a colonia was founded, i.e. a military outpost which was to be a copy in all respects of the Roman State, it was absolutely essential that its ius divinum should be laid down; it must have a religious charter as well as a civil one. Even at the very end of the life of the Republic, when Caesar founded a colony in Spain, he ordained that, within ten days of its first magistrates taking office, they should consult the Senate "quos et quot dies festos esse et quae sacra fieri publice placeat et quos ea sacra facere placeat," i.e. as to the calendar, the ritual, and the priesthood.345 The Romans, of course, assumed that Numa, their priest-king, had done the same thing for Rome; Livy describes him as ordaining a pontifex to whom he entrusted the care of all these matters, with written rules to follow.346 This was the imaginary religious charter of the Roman State. Without it the citizen, or rather his official representative, would not know with the necessary accuracy the details of the cura and caerimonia; without it, too, the deities could not be expected to perform their part of advancing the interests of the State, and indeed, as I think we shall find, could not be expected to retain the strength and vitality which they needed for the work. Support was needed on each side; the State needed the help of the gods, and the gods needed the help of the State's care and worship.

The ways and means towards the maintenance of this pax were as follows. First, the deities must be duly placated, and their powers kept in full vigour, by the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, performed at the proper times and places by authorised persons skilled in the knowledge of that ritual. Secondly, there must be an exact fulfilment of all vows or solemn promises made to the deities by the State or its magistrates, or by such private persons as might have made similar engagements. Thirdly, the city, its land and its people, must be preserved from all evil or hostile influences, whether spiritual or material or both, by the process broadly known as lustratio, which we commonly translate purification. Lastly, strict attention must be paid to all outward signs of the will of the gods, as shown by omens and portents of various kinds. This last method of securing the pax became specially prominent much later in Roman history, and I prefer to postpone detailed discussion of it for the present; but the other three we will now examine, with the help of evidence mainly derived from facts of cult, not from the fancies of mythologists.

First, then, I take sacrifice, dealing only with the general principles of sacrificial rites, so far as we can discern them in the numerous details which have come down to us. The word sacrificium, let us note, in its widest sense, may cover any religious act in which something is made sacrum, i.e. (in its legal sense) the property of a deity;347 I am not now concerned to conjecture what exactly may have been the meaning of this immortal word before it was embodied in the ius divinum. "Sacrificium" is limited in practical use by the Romans themselves to offerings, animal or cereal, made on the spot where the deity had taken up his residence, or at some place on the boundary of land or city (e.g. the gate) which was under his protection, or (in later times at least) at a temporary altar erected during a campaign. Thus it was as much a sacrificium when the paterfamilias threw at each meal a portion of the food into the fire, the residence of Vesta, as when the consul offered a victim to Mars on the eve of a battle.

Sacrifices have generally been divided into the three classes of (1) honorific, where the offering is believed to be in some sense a gift to the deity; (2) piacular, or sin-offerings, where the victim was usually burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering together with him.348 The two former are constant and typical in the Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance being attached to the due distribution.349 Here the Latin race "yearly acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the epulum Iovis on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the magistrates and senate.350 But we have not yet arrived at the age when this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however, faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a whole, but of the thirty curiae into which it was divided,351 there seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though invisible. Yet the ius divinum of the Roman State assuredly did not encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State festivals, in which we cannot include even the feriae Latinae, the sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular. If I am not mistaken, the idea of participation by the people in solemn sacred rites was discouraged by the Roman priesthood; in the ius divinum the line drawn between sacrum and profanum was clear; scenes of gluttony or revelry, like the Greek hecatombs, were eliminated from the sacra publica, as I have already pointed out. Not till the advent of the Sibylline books and the Graecus ritus did the people take an active part in the State religion; their duty was merely to abstain from disturbance during the performance of sacred rites. "Feriis iurgia amovento" is the only reference in Cicero's imaginary sketch of the ius divinum to the conduct of the citizen on festival days.352[352] Within the family, the curia, the gens, there might be direct and active participation in daily or yearly ceremonies, but it was an essential principle of the life of the city-state that its business, religious as well as civil, should be carried out for the citizens by officials specially appointed.

In the typical and organised worship of the State, i.e. sacrifice honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the ius divinum, the utmost care was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable to the deity; that nothing profanum should cross the threshold of the divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense of obligation and duty, pietas, as they called it, was thus very early developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet bred contempt; religio, as we saw, was still strong among them—the feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical end in view, it was particularly true of them.

First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex, who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa, Livy has described his inauguratio in terms of the ius divinum of later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.353 After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the lucky side) with veiled head, holding the lituus354 of his office in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the regiones from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the ager Romanus, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen might be accepted. Then, passing the lituus to his left hand, he laid his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter, if it be thy will (fas) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within the limits which I have marked out." Then he said aloud what auspicia he sought for (i.e. whether of birds, lightning, or what); and when they appeared, Numa descended as rex from the citadel. This process was called inauguratio; it is attested for the confirmation of the election of the three flamines maiores, the rex, and the augurs, in historical times,355 whatever was the method of that election, and without it the priest was not believed to be acceptable to the gods. It is not mentioned by Roman writers in connection with the Pontifices or the Vestals; if this be not merely from dearth of evidence, it is not easy to account for, unless the reason were that neither body was specially concerned with sacrifice. But the principle is perfectly clear—that the person who is to represent the community in worship must be one of whom the numina openly express approval.

A priest, sacerdos, is thus a person set apart by special ritual for the service of the sacra populi Romani. The rex no doubt himself made the selection and supervised the inauguratio of the other priests at whose head he was. When the kingship came to an end, his powers of this kind passed to the pontifex maximus; and it may be as well to add at once that his sacrificial powers, though they were in a special sense inherited by a priest who took his title, the rex sacrorum, passed with the civil power to all magistrates cum imperio, who wore the toga praetexta symbolic of priestly function, and had the right of presiding at sacrificial rites both at home and in the field. Thus magistrate and priest, though quite distinct under the Republic from the point of view of public law, have certain characteristics in common as deriving from a common source in the powers of the rex.356

But to return to the period of Numa and the calendar: it was not only necessary that the priest should be acceptable to the gods, but that he should be marked off from the rest of the community as being dedicated to their service. As Dr. Jevons says,357 in all early religions priests are marked off from other worshippers, partly by what they do, and partly by what they may not do; and what he means is (1) that the priest originally was the person who alone could slay a victim; (2) that in consequence of his sacredness he was subject to a great number of restrictions. I have already spoken of these restrictions or priestly taboos in my second lecture; and as I believe that in the period we are now dealing with they were little more than a survival, I shall not return to them now. But of the outward insignia, which marked off the priest as alone entitled to perform the essential act of worship, the sacrifice, and which bring him out of the region of the profanum into that of sacrum, I must say a few words before going farther.

In historical times the actual slaying of the victim was done by subordinates, popae, victimarii, etc.; but there is no doubt whatever that it was originally the work of the priest, for he seems at all times to have used one gesture which is clearly symbolic of it,358 and there are traces also of a practice of wearing the toga in such a way as to leave the right arm free for the act.359 That toga, or any other special robe worn by the priest, was always in whole or part red or purple. The purple-edged toga praetexta was worn both by priests and magistrates, and by children under age; and I think there is good reason to believe that in all these cases the original idea was the same—that they took part, directly or indirectly, as primary or secondary agents in sacrificial acts. The Salii and the augurs wore the trabea, which was of purple or red, or both; the flamines had a special robe about the colour of which we are not informed, but the Flaminica Dialis wore a purple garment called rica, and a red veil called flammeum, which was also worn by the bride in the religious ceremony of marriage. Whether we are to see in this prevalence of red or purple any symbolism of the shedding of blood in sacrifice I cannot be sure, but the inference is a tempting one, and has been put forward with confidence by some recent investigators. It is worth noting that the Vestals, who did not sacrifice animals, wore white only.360 If the red colour has anything to do with blood-shedding, it is probably more than merely symbolic; it may mean that the sacrificing priest partakes of that life and strength which he passes on to the god through the blood, that is the life, of the victim.361

The Roman priests had also other insignia, of which the original meaning is less evident. The Flamen Dialis, and probably all the flamines, wore a cap with an olive-twig fastened to the top of it; this is well shown in the sculptures of the Ara Pacis of Augustus.362 The flaminicae had a head-dress called tutulus, which consisted in part, at least, of a purple fillet or ribbon. The flamines, when actually sacrificing, wore a galerus, or hood of some kind made of the skin of a victim, and the Flamen Dialis in particular wore one made of the skin of a white heifer sacrificed to Jupiter.363 In these various ways all priests were outwardly shown to be holy men, sacerdotes, marked off from the profanum vulgus. Only for the pontifices we have no information as to a special dress, just as we also have none as to their inauguratio.364

Thus there is no question that the priests were chosen and separated from the people in such a way as to meet with the approval of the gods; and even the acolytes, camilli and camillae, boys and girls who frequently appear in sacrificial scenes on monuments, wore the toga praetexta, and, in order to be acceptable, must be the children of living parents.365 This rule has lately been the subject of a discussion by Dr. Frazer, on which he has brought to bear, as usual, a great range of learning. He regards the restriction not so much as a matter of good omen, i.e. of freedom from contamination by the death of a parent, but as pointing to a notion that they were "fuller of life and therefore luckier than orphans."366 Whether or no this explanation is the right one, it is quite consistent, as we shall see directly, with the general idea of sacrifice at Rome, and the learning by which it is supported is in any case of interest and value.

There is abundant evidence from historical times that all worshippers, and therefore a fortiori all priests, when sacrificing, had to be personally clean and free from every kind of taint; a rule which also held good for the utensils used in the worship, which in many cases at least were of primitive make and material, not such as were in common use.367 The need of personal purity is well expressed by Tibullus in his description of a rural festival368:—

These lines indicate an approach at least to the idea of mental as well as material purity; and Cicero in his ius divinum in the de Legibus369 actually reaches that idea: "caste iubet lex adire ad deos, animo videlicet, in quo sunt omnia: nec tollit castimoniam corporis," etc. But this is the language of a later age, and does not reflect the notions of the old Roman, but rather those of the religious philosophy of the Greek. The personal purity which the Roman rule required was a survival from a set of primitive ideas, closely connected with taboo, which we are only now beginning to understand fully. They are common to all or almost all peoples who have made any progress in systematising their sacrificial worship. As Dr. Westermarck has recently expressed it,370 "they spring from the idea that the contact of a polluting substance with anything holy is followed by injurious consequences. It is supposed to deprive a deity or holy being of its holiness.... So also a sacred act is believed to lose its sacredness by being performed by an unclean individual." And in the next sentence he goes still farther back in the history of the belief, pointing out that a polluting substance is itself held to contain mysterious energy of a baneful kind. But I must leave this interesting subject now; the story of the evolution of the habit of cleanliness from these ancient ideas will be found in the thirty-ninth chapter of his Origin and Development of Moral Ideas.

Coming next to the act of sacrifice itself, it is needless to say that the victim must be as exactly fitted to please the deity—if that be the right way to express the obligation—as the priest who sacrificed it. It must be of the right kind, sex, age, colour; it must go willingly to the slaughter, adorned with fillets and ribbons (infulae, vittae), in order to mark it off from other animals as holy; in the case of oxen, we hear also of the gilding of the horns, but this must have been costly and unusual.371 All these details were doubtless laid down in the ius divinum, and in later times, when the deities dwelt in roofed temples, they were embodied in the lex or charter of each temple.372 I do not need to go into them here minutely; for my present purpose, the elucidation of the meaning which the Romans attached to sacrificial worship, it will be sufficient to point out that all victims, so far as we know, were domestic animals, and in almost all cases they were valuable property (pecunia), such as belonged to the stock of the Latin farmer, ox, sheep, pig, varying according to age and sex. Goats were used at the Lupercalia, and a horse was sacrificed to Mars, as we have seen, on October 15, and at the Robigalia in April a red dog was offered to the spirit of the mildew. But though time forbids me to explain all these rules, a careful study of the evidence for them is most useful for any one who wishes to understand the influence of the ius divinum on the mind of the early Roman. In the family what rules were needed were matter of tradition; deities were few, and offerings limited. But in the city-state it was very different; here even the di indigetes were many, with diverse wishes and likings as well as functions: how were these to be ascertained and remembered at the right moment? Here, as in all methods of securing the pax deorum, a central supervising authority was needed, in whose knowledge and wisdom the whole community had confidence; and he was found in the rex, as is clearly shown in the whole traditional account of the priest-king Numa. Very naturally tradition also ascribed to Numa the institution of the pontifices, whom the historical Romans knew as succeeding the rex in the supervision of religious law.373

If all went well, the victim going willingly and no ill omen supervening, the actual slaughter followed at the altar. During the whole operation silence was enjoined; the priests' heads were veiled with the folds of the toga;374 pipers (tibicines) continued to play, in order that no unlucky sound or word might be heard which would make it necessary to start afresh with another victim (instauratio). Immediately before the slaughter the victim was made holier than ever by sprinkling upon it fragments of sacred cake made of far (immolatio), and by pouring on it libations of wine from a foculus or movable altar containing this holy condiment, together with incense if that were used in the rite. As soon as it was dead, the internal organs were examined to make sure that there was no physical defect or abnormal growth, for it was, of course, quite as necessary that the animal should be "purus" within as without; this was the only object of the examination, until the Etruscan art of extipicina made its way to Rome. What became of the blood we are not told; I have already remarked that blood has curiously little part in Roman ritual and custom.375 But the exta, i.e. internal organs of life, were separated from the rest of the carcase, and carefully cooked in holy vessels, before being laid upon the altar (porrectio), together with certain slices of flesh called magmenta, or increase-offerings, while the rest of the flesh, which had now lost its holiness, was retained for the use of the priests.376 The time occupied in the actual slaughter and inspection of the organs was not long; but the cooking of these must have been often a lengthy process. Ovid tells us how on April 25 he met the Flamen Quirinalis carrying out the exta of a dog and a sheep, which had been sacrificed at Rome to Robigus that morning, in order to lay them on the altar of that deity at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia.377 Certain days in the calendar, called endotercisi, which were nefasti in morning and evening, were fasti in the middle of the day, between the slaying of a victim and the placing of its exta on the altar (inter hostiam caesam et exta porrecta).378

I have so far purposely omitted one important detail—the prayer which, so far as we know, invariably accompanied the sacrifice. It is not absolutely certain at what moment of the rite it was said at Rome; in the ritual of Iguvium we find it occurring immediately before the placing of the exta on the altar;379 but as that ritual is a processional one, concerned with sacrifices at several spots, the two chief parts of the rite, the slaughter and the porrectio, probably followed closely on one another. We may perhaps guess that where these two parts were separated by a considerable interval, as in the majority of Roman festivals, the prayer was said by the priest also at the moment of porrectio. The prayer is so important a detail as to need separate handling—important because it helps us to interpret the ideas of the Romans about their sacrifices, and the attitude in which they conceived themselves as standing towards the deities whom they thus approached. I propose to occupy the rest of this lecture in considering this most interesting topic. I wish first to draw attention to a particular feature, or rather expression, which occurs in the authentic wording of certain prayers which we are lucky enough to possess, because I think it throws some light on the meaning which the Romans attached to the sacrifice it accompanied; and secondly, to consider the character of Roman prayers generally, in view of a question now being largely discussed, i.e. whether prayer is a development from spell or charm, belonging in its origin to the region of magic.

We have various forms of prayer surviving in Roman literature: some of them are versified by the poets, and therefore give us a general impression of the contents without the actual and genuine wording; we have also two fragments of ancient carmina which have the form of prayers, those of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales; and we have certain forms used on special occasions, such as the evocatio of the gods of a hostile community, or the formulae of vows (vota) which I must postpone to the next lecture. But the only unquestionably genuine old Roman prayers used at sacrifice, taken from the books of the pontifices and preserved word for word, are those which Cato embodied in his treatise on agriculture in the second century b.c., as proper to be used with sacrifice on certain occasions in the agricultural year.380 It is here that we meet with the phrase, familiar in another form to all Latin scholars, on which I wish to lay stress now. It occurs in all the four forms of prayer which Cato copied down. The first is at the time of the flowering of the pear-trees, on behalf of the oxen: "Iuppiter dapalis, quod tibi fieri oportet in domo familia mea culignam vini dapi eius rei381 ergo, macte hac illace dape polucenda esto." And again, when the wine is offered: "Iuppiter dapalis, macte istace dape polucenda esto. Macte vino inferio esto." So in the piacular sacrifice when a clearing is made, the unknown deity is addressed in the last words of the prayer thus: "harum rerum ergo macte hoc porco piaculo immolando esto." We find this macte esto again in the prayer for the ceremony of lustratio, at the end of the formula: "macte hisce suovetaurilibus lactentibus immolandis esto." In the rite of the porca praecidanea, to which I have already referred, the instruction for the invocation of Jupiter runs: "Fertum (i.e. a kind of cake) Iovi obmoveto et mactato sic, Iuppiter, te hoc ferto obmovendo bonas preces precor, uti sies volens propitius mihi liberisque meis domo familiaeque meae mactus hoc ferto." Janus gets another kind of cake (strues) and a wine-offering, and is addressed in the same way. Then we read, "Iovi fertum obmoveto mactatoque item, ut prius feceris."

What is the real meaning of this phrase macte esto, which must surely have been in universal use at sacrifices, not only at private rites like those of Cato, since it came to be used in common speech of congratulation or felicitation, e.g. macte virtute esto?382 Servius in commenting on Virgil has made it sufficiently clear. He explains it as magis aucte, and connects it with magmentum, increase-offering, quasi magis augmentum, and adds that when the victims had been slain and their exta placed on the altar, they were said to be mactatae. So, too, in another comment he seems to connect the word with the victim rather than with the deity. But he is quite clear as to the meaning of the word, as signifying an increase or addition of some kind; and though his etymology is wrong, we may be sure that he was right in this respect, for it is beyond doubt built on a base, mac or mag, which produced magnus, maius, maiestas, and so on. "Macte nova virtute puer" means "Be thou increased, strengthened in virtus"; a fragment of Lucilius (quoted by Servius) brings this out well, "Macte inquam virtute simulque his viribus esto," and another from Ennius, "Livius inde redit magno mactatus triumpho."383 We might almost translate it in these passages by "glorified"; but it most certainly includes the meaning of "strengthened" or "increased in might."

Now in the formulae of Cato we have seen that it is applied to the deity and not to the victim; this naturally did not occur to Servius, whose mind was occupied rather with Virgil and the literary use of the word than with the original use and meaning of the language of prayer. Undoubtedly he has made a mistake here, which Cato's piety has enabled us to detect. It was, in fact, the deity whose strength was to be increased by the offerings; so much at least seems to me to be beyond doubt. There is, indeed, no certain trace in the ritual, or in Roman literature, that the gods were supposed to consume the exta, or the cakes and wine offered them; that primitive notion must have been excluded from the ius divinum. But instead of it we find the more spiritual idea that by placing on the altar the organs of the life of the victim, with ancient forms of sacred cake and offerings of wine, the vitality of the deity, his power to help his worshippers, to make the corn grow and the cattle bring forth young, to aid the State against enemies, or what not, was really increased in this semi-mystic way. Let us remember that the Roman numina were powers constantly at work in their own sphere; they are the various manifestations of the one Power as conceived in immediate relation to man and his wants; they are sometimes addressed in prayer, as we have seen, by additional titles which suggest their strength and vitality: Virites Quirini, Nerio Martis, Moles Martis, Maia or Maiestas Volcani. What, then, could be more natural than that the Roman should call upon his divine fellow-citizen to accept that which, according to ancient tradition and practice, will keep up his strength, and at the same time increase his glory and his goodwill towards his worshippers? This is, then, the idea which I believe to have been at the root of Roman sacrificial ritual, and it seems to confirm the dynamic theory of sacrifice recently propounded by some French anthropologists, i.e. that a mystic current of religious force passed through the victim, from priest to deity, and perhaps back again.384 I believe that we have here a transitional idea of the virtue of sacrifice—an idea that bridges over the gulf between the crude notion that the gods actually partake of the offering, and the later more spiritual view that the offering is an honorary gift "to the glory of God." It seems also to be found in the Vedic religion. Dr. Farnell writes: "In the Vedic ritual we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper, but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer, and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act (such as that of sacrifice). "May our prayers increase Agni": "The prayers fill thee with power and strengthen thee, like great rivers the Sindhu."385

I must now turn to the form and manner of Roman prayers, in order to gain further light on the question as to the mental attitude of the worshipper towards the deity invoked. Of late years there has been a strong tendency to find the origin of prayer in spell; or, in other words, to discover a bridge between that mental attitude which believes that a deity can be forced into a certain course of action by magical formulae, and the humble attitude of the petitioner in prayer, which assumes that the power of the deity altogether transcends that of his worshipper. The evidence of Roman prayers is, I think, of considerable value in dealing with this question; but it needs to be carefully studied and handled. The general impression conveyed by those who have written on the subject is that Roman prayers were dull, dry formulae, which were believed to have a constraining influence on the deity simply as formulae, if they were repeated with perfect precision the right number of times. Dr. Westermarck, for example, has no shadow of a doubt about this; quoting Renan, he says that "in the Roman, as in the majority of the old Italian cults, prayer is a magic formula, producing its effect by its own inherent quality." And again, he writes that the Romans were much more addicted to magic than to religion; "they wanted to compel the gods rather than to be compelled by them. Their religio was probably near akin to the Greek κατἁδεσμοϛ, which meant not only an ordinary tie, but also a magic tie or knot or a bewitching thereby."386 I need not stop to point out the misconception of the word religio which suggested the whole of this passage; the supposed derivation from ligare was quite enough to suggest magic to those who are on the trail of it.387 Let us go on to examine the prayers themselves; I think we shall find that though there is much truth in the common view of them, it is not quite the whole truth.

The oldest Roman prayers we possess are usually called hymns, because the Latin word for them was carmen, viz. the Carmen Saliare, which is too obscure and fragmentary to be of use to us, and the Carmen of the Arval Brethren, which is preserved on stone and is quite intelligible.388 The word carmen, let us notice, was used by the old Romans for any kind of metrical formula, whether hymn, prayer, or spell. Pliny, when writing of magic and incantations, plainly includes prayer among them;389 and Dr. Jevons has recently pointed out that singing, and especially singing in a low voice or muttered tones, is a characteristic of magic not only in Greece and Rome, but in many parts of the world at the present day.390 The evidence of the word is thus strongly in favour of the view that these ancient carmina of Roman worship were really spells; and the Carmen Arvalium itself does not contradict it. After an elaborate sacrificial ceremonial the priests, using a written copy of the carmen (libellis acceptis), danced in triple rhythm (tripodaverunt) while they sang it; it consisted of six clauses, each repeated three times. "Enos Lases iuvate! Neve luerve Marmar sins incurrere in pleores! Satur fu fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber! Semunes alternei advocapit cunctos! Enos Marmar iuvato! Triumpe!" With the precise interpretation of these words I am not now concerned; but they obviously contain invocations to the Lares and Mars, which may be either petitions or commands, and which perhaps are really on the borderland between the two; and as thrice repeated, and accompanied with dancing and gesticulation, they seem certainly to belong rather to the region of magic than of religion proper.

It is interesting to compare with this carmen the prayers of the guild of brethren (Attiedii) at Iguvium; these are the best preserved of all old Italian prayers, and though not Roman, are the product of the same race. In the lustratio of the arx (Ocris Fisius) of Iguvium we find three several deities invoked, with elaborate sacrificial ritual, at three gates, and a long prayer addressed to each deity, thrice repeated, as in the Carmen Arvale. It is to be said under the breath (tacitus precator totum, vi. A. 55), which was a common practice also at Rome, and is believed to be characteristic of the magical spell;391 and except in the case of the first prayer, which is addressed to the chief deity Jupiter Grabovius, it is accompanied by some kind of dancing or rhythmical movement (tripodatio).392 Thus in outward form this ritual seems to show but little advance on the Roman prayer of the Arvales, and indeed it may in substance go back to a time as remote as that in which the latter had its origin. But when we examine the matter of the prayer, we find that it is cast in the language of petition beyond all doubt—if it be rightly interpreted, as we may believe it is:—

"Te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine: volens sis, propitius sis arci Fisiae, urbi Iguvinae, arcis nomini, urbis nomini. Sancte, te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Sancti fiducia te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Dive Grabovie te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, etc. Dive Grabovi, illius anni quiquomque in arce Fisia ignis ortus est, in urbe Iguvina ritus debiti omissi sunt, pro nihilo ducito. Dive Grabovi, quicquid tui sacrificii vitiatum est, peccatum est, peremptum est, fraudatum est, demptum est, tui sacrificii visum invisum vitium est, dive Grabovi, quicquid ius sit, hoc bove opimo piaculo piando.... Dive Grabovi, piato arcem Fisiam, piato urbem Iguvinam. Dive Grabovi, piato arcis Fisiae, urbis Iguvinae, nomen, magistratus, ritus, viros, pecora, fundos, fruges: piato, esto volens propitius pace tua arci Fisiae, etc. Dive Grabovi, salvam servato arcem Fisiam salvam servato urbem Iguvinam .... Dive Grabovi, te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine, Dive Grabovi, te invocavi."393

That in this prayer, and the others which accompany it, exactness of wording was believed to be essential, as in the ritual which preceded it exactness of performance, there is no doubt; for at the end of the whole document (vi. B. 48) we find that if there had been any slip in the ritual, the Brethren had to go back to the first gate and begin all over again. There is plainly present the idea, surviving from an age of magic, that the deities had strong feelings about the right way of invocation, and would not respond to the performance unless those feelings were understood and appealed to; that they would miss something and decline to do their part. Yet are we justified in going on to assume that they were bound, as by a solemn contract, to perform their part, if there were no slip in the ritual? I confess it is difficult for me to take this further step, in view of the language of the prayers, which is so clearly that of petition, nay, of humble petition. We are not dealing here with vota, to which I shall come in the next lecture, and in which there is a kind of legal contract between the man and the god—the former undertaking to do something pleasing to the deity, if the latter shall have faithfully performed what is asked of him. These vota, so abundant in historical times, are really responsible for the idea that Roman prayer is simply a binding formula—a magical spell, let us say, which in the hands of a city priesthood has become a quasi-legal formula. But these prayers are not vota; they do not contain any language which betrays the notion of binding the deity. They seem to me to mark a process of transition between the age of spell and magic and the age of prayer and religion; they retain some of the outward characteristics of spell, but internally, i.e. in the spirit in which they were intended, they have the real characteristics of prayer.394 The numina to whom they were addressed were powerful spirits, unknown, unfamiliar, until their wishes were discovered by the organised priesthood which handed down these forms of petition.

To return to Rome, and to the prayers in Cato's book, to which I referred just now when discussing the word macte. Attempts have been made to prove that these were originally written in metre;395 and this is quite possible. If so, it only means that they retained the outward form of the primitive spell; it must not lead us on to fancy that the sacrifice which accompanied the prayer was a magical act, or that the whole process was believed to compel the deity. No doubt there was believed to be efficacy in the exact repetition, as is shown by the directions for piacular sacrifices in case of error of any kind.396 But the language is the language of prayer, not of compulsion, nor even of bargaining: "Eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo immolando bonas preces precor, ut sies volens propitius mihi, domo familiaeque meis."397 "Mars pater, te precor quaesoque uti sies volens propitius mihi, domo," etc.398 No amount of vain repetition or scruple can deprive this language of its natural meaning. The god is powerful in his own sphere of action, and man has no control over him; man is fully recognised as liable to misfortune unless the god helps him; but he can worship in full assurance of faith that his prayer will be answered, if it be such as the authorities of the State have laid down as the right wording, and if the ritual accompanying it is equally in order. The faith is, indeed, thus founded upon man's devices rather than the god's good-will as such; it is a belief in the State and its authorities and ius divinum, which is conceived, not indeed as constraining the deity, but as calling upon him (invocare) to perform his part, in formulae which he cannot well neglect, simply because it would be unreasonable to do so, contrary to his nature as a deity of the Roman State and its ager.

It is obvious in all this sacrificial ritual that the officiating person or persons were expected to observe the traditional forms with the utmost care and exactness. Any slip or omission was, in fact, a piaculum, or sacrum commissum—terms of the ius divinum which seem to suggest, if I may use the expression, the obverse side of holiness. It is now well known that cleanness and uncleanness, holiness and its opposite, can be expressed in religious vocabulary by the same terms, for in both cases there is something beyond the ordinary, something dangerous, uncanny; thus we are not surprised to find that such words as I have just mentioned can be used to express some kind of impurity caused by a breach of ritual as well as that ritual itself. If we accept the latest theory of sacrifice, i.e. the dynamic theory, as it is called, we explain this intense nervousness about a ritualistic flaw as occasioned by the consciousness of a breach in the current of "religious force" (the expression is that of Messrs. Hubert and Mauss399), which must pass in regular sequence from the sacrificer through the victim to the deity, or vice versa. If this is the true explanation—and at present it may be said to hold the field—then the extreme exactness of the Roman ritual was a survival from an age when this strange feeling was a reality; but no more than a survival, for, so far as I can discover, the Roman idea was rather that the deity to whom the ritual was addressed was in some way offended by the omission.400 The dynamic notion is lost, if it ever were there, and its place has been taken by one that we may perhaps call theological. But however that may be, the culprit was regarded as in a state of sin or impurity, "un être sacré," and had to get rid of this sin or impurity by another sacrifice before the whole ritual could be started afresh (instaurare).

According to the "dynamic" theory of sacrifice, we might naturally expect that the victim, as being destined to carry away the unholiness (or whatever we choose to call it) of the culprit, would be burnt whole, not offered to the deity in the form of exta, or eaten by the sacrificers.401 But this does not seem to have been the case in the Roman practice; in all the examples of piacula of which we have details, the exta are laid on the altar as in the typical sacrifice.402 The inference seems to be that the theological idea of sacrifice had established itself completely ever since the formation of the ius divinum; the victim is not a scapegoat in any sense, but really an expiatory offering; and not only does the sacrificer yield up something of value, but he offers it to increase the strength of the deity as well as to appease his anger.

A curious point may be noticed in the last place. The practical Roman mind seems to have invented a kind of sacrificial insurance, by which a piacular sacrifice might be offered beforehand to atone for any omission in the ritual which was to follow. Thus the Fratres Arvales, if they had to take an iron implement into their sacred grove, offered a piaculum before as well as after this breach of religious rule.403 Again, the porca praecidanea, which I have already mentioned as offered before harvest, was an example of the same system of insurance; for the first cutting of the corn was a sacred rite, and one in which it was easy to take a false step. Writing of this, Gellius says in general terms that hostiae praecidaneae are those which are offered the day before sacrificia solennia.404

The term "piacular sacrifice" (piaculum) had a wide range of meaning, apart from the examples here given. With one important form of it I shall deal in the next lecture:405 others we shall come across later on.

NOTES TO LECTURE VIII

LECTURE IX

RITUAL—continued

In the last lecture we found that the magical element in the Roman ritual is exaggerated by recent writers. But it has also long been the practice to describe that ritual as a system of bargaining with the gods: as partaking of the nature of a legal contract. "The old Roman worship was businesslike and utilitarian. The gods were partners in a contract with their worshippers, and the ritual was characterised by the hard formalism of the legal system of Rome. The worshipper performed his part to the letter with the scrupulous exactness required in pleadings before the praetor."406 This is an excellent statement of a view very generally held, especially since Mommsen, whose training in Roman law made him apt to dwell on the legal aspects of Roman life, wrote the famous chapter in the first volume of his history. I now wish to examine this view briefly.

No doubt it was suggested by the necessary familiarity of the Roman historian with vota publica, the vows so frequently made on behalf of the State by its magistrates, in terms supplied by the pontifices, and dictated by them to the magistrate undertaking the duty. Some few of these formulae have survived, and it may certainly be said of them that they are analogous to legal formulae, and express the quasi-contractual nature of the process. Such legalised religious contracts seem to be peculiar to Rome; they are curiously characteristic of the Roman genius for formularisation, which in course of time had most important effects in the domain of civil law. But the vow as such is, of course, by no means peculiar to Rome; it is familiar in Greek history, and is found in an elementary form among savages at the present day.407 But at Rome both in public and private life it is far more frequent and striking than elsewhere. This is a phenomenon that calls for careful study; and we must beware that we are not misled by quasi-legal developments into missing the real significance of it from the point of view of morality and religion.

The vota privata, which include vows and offerings made to deities by private individuals, had never been adequately examined till De Marchi wrote his book on the private religion of the Romans; nor could they have been so examined until the Corpus Inscriptionum was fairly well advanced. There the material is extraordinarily abundant, but it is, of course, almost entirely of comparatively late date, and the great majority of votive inscriptions belong to the period of the Empire. Yet it is quite legitimate to argue from this to an origin of this form of worship in the earliest times, and we have enough early evidence to justify the inference. Among the oldest Latin inscriptions are some found on objects such as cups or vases, showing that the latter were votive offerings to a deity: thus we have Saeturni poculum, Kerri poculum, and other similar ones which will be found at the beginning of the first volume of the Corpus.408 They give only the name of the deity as a rule, and do not tell us why the object was offered to him; but they must have been thank-offerings for some supposed blessing. In one case, not indeed at Rome, but not far away at Praeneste, we have proof of this; for a mother makes a dedication to Fortuna nationu cratia, which plainly expresses gratitude for good luck in childbirth;409 and this inscription is one of the oldest we possess. Nor do they tell us whether there was a previous vow or promise of which the offering is the fulfilment. But in the majority of inscriptions of late date the familiar letters V.S.L.M. (votum solvit lubens merito) betray the nature of the transaction, and it is not unreasonable to guess that there was usually a previous undertaking of some kind, to be carried out if the deity were gracious.

But these private vota were not, strictly speaking, legal transactions, supposed to bind both parties in a contract, as we shall see was to some extent the case with the vota publica. They could not have needed the aid of a pontifex, or a solemn voti nuncupatio, i.e. statement of the promise; they were rather, as De Marchi asserts,410 spontaneous expressions of what we may call religious feeling; and it may be that he is right in maintaining that throughout Roman history they remained as expressions of the religious sense and of the better feeling of the lower classes. The practice implies three conceptions: (1) of the deity as really powerful for good and evil; (2) of the gift, a work of supererogation, as likely to please him; (3) of the grateful act and feeling as good in themselves. Surely there must have been in this practice a germ of moral development; I am surprised that Dr. Westermarck has not mentioned in his chapter on gratitude the extraordinary abundance of Roman votive offerings and inscriptions. Doubtless there lies at the root of it the idea of Do ut des, or rather of Dabo ut des; doubtless also it could be turned to evil purposes in the form of devotio, when promises were made to a deity on condition that he killed or injured an enemy; but in the ordinary and common example it is impossible to deny that the final act, the performance of the vow, must have been accompanied by a feeling of gratitude. The merest recognition of a supposed blessing is of value in moral development.

But it is in the vota publica that we undoubtedly find something in the nature of a bargain—covenant would be a more graceful word—with a deity in the name of the State. Even here, however, the impression is rather produced by the use of legal terms and the formularisation of the process, than by any assumed attitude of contempt towards, or even of equality with, the deity concerned. There is no trace in early Roman religious history of any tendency to abuse or degrade the divine beings if they did not perform their part, such as is well known in China,411 or even, strange to say, occasionally met with in the southern Italy of to-day; the attitude towards the deity in cult (though not invariably in the later Graeco-Roman literature) was ever respectful, as it was towards the magistrates of the State. The farthest the Romans ever went in condemning their gods was when misfortune persuaded them that they were become indifferent or useless; then they began to neglect them, and to turn to other gods, as we shall see in subsequent lectures.

The public vota were of two kinds: the ordinary, or regularly recurring, and the extraordinary, which were occasioned by some particular event. Of the ordinary, the most familiar is that undertaken by the consul, and no doubt in some form by the Rex in the days of the kingship, for the benefit of the State on the first day of the official year. Accompanied by the Senate and a crowd of people, the consuls went up to the Capitoline temple, and performed the sacrifice which had been vowed by their predecessors of a year before; after which they undertook a new votum, "pro reipublicae salute."412 We have not the formula of this vow, and cannot tell what resemblance it bore to a bargain; but the ceremony itself must have been most impressive, and calculated to remind all who were present of the greatness and goodwill of the supreme deity who watched over the interests of the State. So too at the lustrum of the censors, which took place in the Campus Martius every five years, it is almost certain that the votum of the predecessors in office was fulfilled by a sacrifice, and a new one undertaken. Here again we are without the formula, but that there was one we know from a very interesting passage of Valerius Maximus. He tells us that Scipio Aemilianus, when as censor he was conducting this sacrifice, and the scriba (on behalf of the pontifex?) was dictating to him the solemne precationis carmen ex publicis tabulis, in which the immortal gods were besought to make the prosperity of the Roman State "better and greater," had the audacity to interrupt him, saying that the condition of the State was sufficiently good and great: "itaque precor ut eas (res) perpetuo incolumes servent." This change, Valerius says, was accepted, and the formula altered accordingly in the tabulae.413 This story, which is probably genuine and is quite characteristic of Scipio, must convince an impartial mind that in this votive ceremony there was enough truth and dignity to suggest a real advance in religious thought, so far at least as the State was concerned.

The extraordinary vota were innumerable. They were occasioned by dangers or misfortunes of various kinds, the magistrate undertaking to dedicate something to the god concerned if the State should have come safely through the peril. Many temples had their origin in this practice;414 we meet also with ludi, special sacrifices, or a tithe of the booty taken in war. In two or three cases Livy has copied the formula from the tabulae of the pontifices; thus before the war with Antiochus in 191 b.c., the consul recited the following words after the pontifex maximus: "Si duellum quod cum Antiocho rege sumi populus iussit, id ex sententia senatus populique Romani confectum erit; tum tibi Iuppiter populus Romanus ludos magnos dies decem continuos faciet ... quisquis magistratus eos ludos quando ubique faxit, hi ludi recte facti, donaque data recte sunto."415 This document dates from the days of the decay of the Roman religion, and is, of course, modernised by Livy; but it may give an idea of what is meant by writers who speak of an element of bargain or covenant in these vota. Still more elaborate, and probably more antique, is the famous formula of the vow of the ver sacrum in the darkest hour of the war with Hannibal.416 This very curious rite, which proves beyond question the devotion of the Italian stocks to the principle of the votum, consisted of a promise to dedicate to Mars or Jupiter all the valuable products of a single spring, including the male children born at that time; to this the Romans had recourse for the last time in 217 b.c., and Livy has fortunately preserved the words of the vow. These, with the exception of the dedication of the children, which is judiciously omitted, probably stand much as they had come down from a remote antiquity. The votum is put in the form of a rogatio to the people, without whose sanction it could not be put in force; are they willing to dedicate to Jupiter all the young of oxen, sheep, or pigs born in the spring five years after date, if the State shall have been preserved during those years from all its enemies? The curious feature of the document is, not that it binds the deity to any course of action, but that it secures the individual Roman against his anger in case of any chance slip in his part of the process, and the people against any evil consequences arising from such a slip or from misdoing on the part of an individual. "Si quis clepsit, ne populo scelus esto neve cui cleptum erit: si atro die faxit insciens, probe factum esto."417 Of this formula a recent writer of great learning and ability has written thus: "The well-known liturgical archive containing Rome's address to Jupiter in the critical days of the Hannibalic war is a wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to bind the god as well as the State."418 He is no exception to the rule that those who have not habitually occupied themselves with the Roman religion are liable to misinterpret its details. This is not an address to Jupiter, nor is there any sign in it that the god was considered as bound to perform his part as in a contract; the covenant is a one-sided one, the people undertaking an act of self-renunciation if the god be gracious to them, and thereby going far to assure themselves that he will so be gracious. And the legal cast of the language, which seems so apt to mislead the unwary,419 is only to be found in the clauses which guarantee the people against the contingency of the whole vow being ruined by the inadvertence or the rascality of an individual; surely a very natural and inevitable caveat, where for once the whole people, and not only their priests or magistrates, were concerned in the transaction.

A curious form of the votum, which, however, I can only mention in passing, is that addressed to the gods of a hostile city, with a view to induce them to desert their temples and take up their abode at Rome; this is the process called evocatio, which was successfully applied at the siege of Veii, when Juno Regina consented to betray her city.420 Macrobius, commenting on Virgil's lines (Aen. ii. 351),

has preserved the carmen used at the siege of Carthage.421 It is cast in the language of prayer: "Si deus si dea est cui populus civitasque Carthaginiensis est in tutela ... precor venerorque veniamque a vobis peto ut vos populum civitatemque Carthaginiensem deseratis," etc.; but it ends with a vow to build temples and establish ludi in honour of these deities if they should comply with the petition. It is worth noting here that it was, of course, impossible to make a bargain with strange or hostile gods, or in any way to force their hand; the promise is entirely one-sided; and I am inclined to think that in dealing with his own gods the mental attitude of the Roman was much the same, though his faith in them was undoubtedly greater.

This is the proper place to mention another very curious rite, closely allied to the votum, but differing from it in one or two important points, which is almost peculiar to the Romans and most characteristic of them; I mean the devotio of himself on the field of battle by a magistrate cum imperio.422 The famous example, familiar to us all, is that of Decius Mus at the battle of Vesuvius in the great Latin war423 (340 b.c.): the same story is told of his son in a war with Gauls and Samnites, and of his grandson in the war with Pyrrhus.424 The historical difficulties of these accounts do not concern us now; by common consent of scholars the method and formula of the devotio are authentic, and the rite must have had its origin in remote antiquity.

The story runs425 that Decius, at whose preliminary sacrifice before the battle with the Latins the liver of the victim had been found imperfect, while that of his colleague was normal, perceived that his wing of the army was giving way. He therefore resolved to sacrifice himself by devotio, and called on the pontifex maximus, who was present, to dictate for him the correct formula. He was directed to put on the toga praetexta, to wear it with the cinctus Gabinus, to veil his head with it, to touch his chin with his hand under the folds of the robe, and to stand upon a spear. He then repeated after the pontifex the following formula: "Iane, Iuppiter, Mars pater, Quirine, Bellona, Lares, divi Novensiles, di Indigetes, divi quorum est potestas nostrorum hostiumque, diique Manes, vos precor, veneror, veniam peto feroque, uti populo Romano Quiritium vim victoriamque prosperetis, hostesque populi Romani Quiritium terrore formidine morteque adficiatis. Sicut verbis nuncupavi, ita pro re publica Quiritium, exercitu legionibus auxiliis populi Romani Quiritium, legiones auxiliaque hostium mecum deis Manibus Tellurique devoveo" (Livy ix. 9). He then mounted his horse and rode into the midst of the enemy to meet his death. The Latins were seized with panic and the Romans were victorious.

Here the vow is made and fulfilled almost at the same moment,—the fulfilment takes place before the gods have done their part. Here too the offering made is the life of a human being which brings the act within the domain of sacrifice. Its sacrificial nature is obvious in all the details.426 The dress is that of the sacrificing priest or magistrate;427 Decius was therefore priest and victim at the same time, and the two characters seem to be combined in the symbolic touching of the chin, which has been rightly explained,428 I think, as analogous to the laying on of hands in the consecratio of the Rex, as we saw it in the case of Numa, and perhaps to the immolatio of a victim by sprinkling the mola salsa on its head; where the object of consecration is made holy by contact with holy things.429 The standing on the spear is difficult to explain; it may have been a symbolic dedication to Mars, whose spear or spears, as we have seen, were kept in the Regia.430

The formula contains certain points of great interest. Firstly, it is not only the Roman gods of all sorts and conditions who are invoked, but those of the enemy also, or, in vague language, those who have power over both Romans and Latins.431 Secondly, it begins with a prayer combined with a curse upon the enemy: in which respect it resembles the prayer at the lustratio populi at Iguvium432 (which I shall mention again directly) and to a later type of devotio used at the siege of Carthage and preserved by Macrobius.433 Thirdly, in spite of this religious aspect of the formula, it ends with what can only be called a magical spell. By the act of self-sacrifice, which is the potent element in the spell, Decius exercises magical power over the legions of the enemy, and devotes them with himself to death,—to the Manes and Mother Earth.434

The story suggests to me that the rite had been at one time well known; the pontifex maximus was ready with the instructions and formula. It was a survival from an age of magic, but the priests have given it a religious turn, and the language of the first part is quite as much that of prayer as is the language of the collect to be said in time of war which still disfigures the Anglican prayer-book.435 What is still more remarkable is that it has not only a religious but an ethical character. The idea of service to the State is here seen at its highest point. The sacrifice is a vicarious one.436 Livy significantly adds that a private soldier might be chosen by the commander to represent him, and that if this man were not killed by the enemy an image seven feet long must be buried in the earth and a piacular sacrifice offered.437 Later on it would seem that instead of sacrificing himself, the consul might implore the gods to accept the hostile army or city as his substitutes: "eos vicarios pro me fide magistratuque meo pro populi Romani exercitibus do devoveo, ut me exercitumque nostrum ... bene salvos siritis esse."438 The idea here, and indeed in the devotio of Decius, bears some analogy to that which lies at the root of the old Roman practice, of making a criminal sacer to the deity chiefly concerned in his crime; when this was done, any man might kill him, and he was practically a victim offered as vicarius for the Roman people, who had been contaminated by his deed.439

But I must now pass on the last kind of ritual to be explained in these lectures, and far the most impressive of all, that of lustratio, or the purification, as it is commonly called, of land, city, human beings, or even inanimate objects, by means of a solemn procession accompanied with sacrifice.

So important a part did these processional rites play in the public life of the Roman people,—so characteristic are they too of the old Roman habit of thought and action, that they have given a wonderful word to the Latin language. Lustrare has many meanings; but the one which is immediately derived from the rites I speak of, that of slow processional movement, is the most beautiful and impressive of them all. When Aeneas first sees Dido in all her stately beauty, he says:440

"So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows of the hills." Here in Scotland you must have all seen this procession of the shadows, as I have watched it when fishing in Wales; let us always associate it with the magic of a poet of nature as well as with the religious processions of his people.

Lustrare, lustratio, are words which, as I think, belong to an age of religion, that is, according to our formula, of effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the Universe. In other processes which are usually called purificatory, magic seems to survive: the word februum, from which comes the name of our second month, meant an object with magical potency, such as water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, or the strips of the victims sacrificed at the Lupercalia, and the verb februare meant to get rid of certain unwholesome or miasmatic influences by means of these objects.441 What was the really primitive idea attached to these words need not concern us now; but Varro, and Ovid following him, explicitly explain them as meaning purifying agents and processes,442 from which we may infer that they had a magical power to produce certain desired conditions, or to protect from evil influences, like charms and amulets. But lustrare and lustratio seem to belong to an age when the thing to be driven or kept away is rather spiritual mischief, and when the means used are sacrifices and prayers, with processional movement.

What is the original meaning of the word lustrare? It seems to be a strong form of luere; and luere is explained by Varro as equivalent to solvere.443 The word lustrum, he says, i.e. the solemn five-yearly ceremony in the Campus Martius, is derived from luere in the sense of solvere, to pay; because every fifth year the contract-moneys for the collection of taxes and for public undertakings were paid into the treasury through the censors. Servius,444 doubtless following him, explains such expressions as peccata luere, supplicium luere, on the same principle—in the sense of payment, just as we speak of paying the penalty. We might thus be tempted to fancy that the root-idea of lustrare is to perform a duty and so get rid of it, as we do in paying for anything we buy; but this would be to misapprehend the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained luere by reference to the payments of contractors. Varro and Servius do, however, suggest the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man's intelligence, but of the duty of man in a civilised State. What exactly it was that was to be got rid of is a more difficult question; but all that we have so far learnt about the early religious ideas of the Romans strongly suggests that they were in what we may call an advanced animistic stage of religious ideas, and that whatever may have been the notion of their primitive ancestors, they themselves, in these rites as we know them, saw the means of getting rid of and so keeping away hostile spirits. A French sociologist, M. van Gennep, whose book Les Rites de passage I have read with great interest, has kindly written me a long letter in which he insists that this animistic interpretation of lustratio is really superfluous, and that the idea of separation alone, i.e. of separation between sacred and profane, without any reference to spirits or dei, is a fully sufficient explanation. So no doubt it may be among many savage peoples; but he would probably allow that as a people advances from one stage of superstition to another, while it retains in outline the scheme of its rites, it will apply new meanings to them in keeping with the changes in its mental attitude. This is one of the most interesting processes with which modern research has been occupied; we are now familiar with the adoption of pre-Christian ceremonies, with a complete change of meaning, in the ritual of the Christian Church. These very processions of lustratio, which had already been once metamorphosed in an animistic period, were seized upon by the Roman Church with characteristic adroitness, adapted to its ritual, and given a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania maior in Rogation week, begging a blessing on the flocks and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.445

But let us now pass briefly in review the more important of these rites of lustration and compare them with each other; we shall find the essential features the same in all of them.

The first permanent difficulty of new settlers in Latium was to mark off their cultivated land from the forest or waste land beyond it, and so, as M. van Gennep would phrase it,446 to make a margin of separation between the sacred and the profane, within which the sacred processes of domestic life and husbandry might go forward, undisturbed by dangers—human, spiritual, or what not—coming from the profane world without. The boundary was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones (cippi) or posts, placed at intervals;447 and thus "a fixed piece of ground is appropriated by a particular social group, so that if any stranger penetrated it he would be committing a sacrilege as complete as he would if he trespassed in a sacred grove or a temple." This boundary-line was made sacred itself by the passage round it (lustratio) at some fixed time of the year, usually in May, when crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences, of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. The two main features of the rite, as formulated by Cato in his treatise on agriculture, are—1, the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig (suovetaurilia), the farmer's most valuable property; 2, the prayer to Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection of the whole familia of the farm, together with the crops of all kinds and the cattle within the boundary-line.448 We are not expressly told that this procession followed the boundary throughout, but the analogy of other lustrations forbids us to doubt it; and thus the rite served the practical purpose of keeping it clear in the memory,—a matter of the utmost importance, especially for the practical Roman. In Cato's formula the farmer's object is to ward off disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility; and it is Mars who is invoked, i.e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but we may safely believe that the primitive farmer used other language, addressing the spirits of disease and dearth themselves; and we may guess, if we will, that again before that there was no invocation or sacrifice at all, but that the object was only to mark the boundary between land civilised and sacred and land uncivilised and profane.

As we have seen, the farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called pagi; and we can hardly doubt that these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. We have no explicit account of a circumambulation in this case, but we have in the later poets several charming allusions to a lustratio pagi, and it is of a rite of this kind that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote the beautiful passage in the first Georgic beginning "In primis venerare deos";449 and the lines

clearly imply a procession with the object of keeping away harmful influences from the crops at a critical time. And when the city-state came into being we may be equally sure that its ager, so long at least as it was small enough to admit of such a processional ritual, was lustrated in the same way. In historical times this ager had become too extensive, and there is no procession to be found among the duties of the Fratres Arvales as we know them when they were revived by Augustus; but we have not, of course, the whole of the "acta" of the Brethren, and even if we had, it would not be likely that we should find any trace of a practice which must have been dropped in course of time as the Roman territory increased. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and practice applied in striking fashion.

As it was necessary to protect the homestead and its land by a sacred boundary, so the city had to be clearly marked off from all that was outside of it. Its walls were sacred, or, strictly speaking, a certain imaginary line outside of them called the pomoerium was sacred. This is well shown in the traditional method of founding a city even in historical times, e.g. a colonia, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch.450 A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze—a rule which shows at once the antiquity and the religious character of the rite, for iron, as we saw, was taboo in most religious ceremonies. A rectangular furrow was drawn where the walls of the city were to be; the earth was turned inwards to mark the future line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomoerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it, and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This probably meant, as Plutarch expressed it, that the walls (or rather the pomoerium), were sacred while the gates were profane; had the gates been holy, scruple would necessarily have been felt about the passage in and out of them of things profane. Thus the pomoerium was a boundary line between the sacred and the profane, like that of the farm; but in historical times it acquired a more definite religious meaning, for within it there could only dwell those deities who belonged to the city and its inhabitants, i.e. the di indigetes, and who were recognised as its divine inhabitants.451 And only within its limits could the auspicia of the city be taken.

We should naturally expect that this sacred boundary would have its holiness secured or revived by an annual lustratio like that of the farm and pagus; and so no doubt it was. But the memory of this survives only in the word amburbium, which, on the analogy of ambarvalia, must mean a rite of this processional kind. Luckily we have definite knowledge of the real lustratio of a city in those ritualistic inscriptions of Iguvium which I have more than once referred to.452 It is the lustratio of the arx, the citadel of Iguvium, which we may guess to have been the original oppidum or germ of the historical city. The details are complex, and show clear traces of priestly organisation; but the main features stand out unmistakably. A procession goes round the arx (ocris Fisia), with the suovetaurilia—ox, sheep, and pig—as in the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, while sacrifice and prayer are offered on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. There were three gates, and each of them is the scene of sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, and they need to be strengthened by annual religious operations; such at least is the most obvious explanation. Whether the Fratres Attiedii would have been able to explain it thus we may doubt; neither in the sacrificial ritual nor in the prayers, as recorded in the inscription, do we find any clear trace of a distinction between the sacred and the profane, or of the idea of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary. So far as we can judge from the prayers, the object is really a religious one, to implore the deities of the city to preserve it and all within it. The language of these prayers hardly differs from that in which a Christian Church of to-day asks for a blessing on a community.453