The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 6

state coronati plenum ad praesaepe iuvenci: c.u.m tepido vestrum vere redibit opus.

rusticus emeritum palo suspendit aratrum: omne reformidat frigida volnus humus.

vilice, da requiem terrae, s.e.m.e.nte peracta: da requiem terram qui coluere viris.

pagus agat festum: pagum l.u.s.trate, coloni, et date paganis annua liba focis.

placentur frugum matres Tellusque Ceresque, farre suo gravidae visceribusque suis.

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

cuncta tibi Cererem p.u.b.es agrestis adoret.

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

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

ludit herboso pecus omne campo c.u.m tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres: festus in _pratis_ vacat otioso c.u.m bove pagus.

There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety--a matter in which the feeling of anxiety and awe (_religio_) brought with it, to use an expression of Cicero's, both _cura_ and _caerimonia_.[171] The _religio terminorum_ is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical times, from the Roman writers on _agrimetatio_; and with their help the whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume of the _Gromatici_.[172] We know that many different objects might serve as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees and stones; and in the case of the latter, which would be the usual _termini_ in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and carefully fixed."[173] This had the practical effect--for all Latin religion has a practical side--of enabling the stone to be identified in the future. But Ovid[174] gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the _religio terminorum_. The boundary-stone is garlanded, and an altar is built; the fire is carried from the hearth of the homestead by a materfamilias, the priestess of the family; a young son of the family holds a basket full of fruits of the earth, and a little daughter shakes these into the fire and offers honey-cakes. Others stand by with wine, or look on in silence, clothed in white. The victims are lamb and sucking-pig, and the stone is sprinkled with their blood, an act which all the world over shows that an object is holy and tenanted by a spirit.[175] And the ceremony ends with a feast and hymns in honour of holy Terminus, who in Ovid's time in the rural districts, and long before on the Capitolium of Rome, had risen from the spirit sanctifying the stone to become a deity, closely connected with Jupiter himself, and to give his name to a yearly city festival on February 23.

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

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

Lastly, the death of a member of the family was an occasion of extreme anxiety, which might, however, be allayed by the exact performance of certain rites (_iusta facere_). The funeral ceremonies of the City-state were of a complicated character, and the details are not all of them easy to interpret. But the principle must have been always the same--that the dead would "walk" unless they had been deposited with due ceremony in the bosom of Mother Earth, and that their natural tendency in "walking" was to find their way back to the house which had been their home in life. Whether buried or burnt, the idea was the same: if burnt, as seems to have been common Roman practice from very early times, at least one bone had to be buried as representing the whole body. We have seen that certain precautions were taken to prevent the dead man from finding his way back, such as carrying him out of the house feet foremost; and if he were properly buried and the house duly purified afterwards, the process of prevention was fairly complete. His ghost, shade, or double then pa.s.sed beneath the earth to join the whole body of Manes in the underworld,[182] and could only return at certain fixed times--such at least was the idea expressed in the customs of later ages. But if a paterfamilias or his representative had omitted _iusta facere_, or if the dead man had never been buried at all, carried off by an enemy or some wild beast, he could never have descended to that underworld, and was roaming the earth disconsolately, and with an evil will. The primitive idea of anxiety is well expressed in the Roman festival of the Lemuria in May, when the head of a household could get rid of the ghosts by spitting out black beans[183] from his mouth and saying, "With these I redeem me and mine." Nine times he says this without looking round: then come the ghosts behind him and gather up the beans unseen. After other quaint performances he nine times repeats the formula, "Manes exite paterni," then at last looks round, and the ghosts are gone.[184] This is plainly a survival from the private life of the primitive household, and well ill.u.s.trates its fears and anxieties; but the State provided, as we shall see, another and more religious ceremony, put limitations on the mischievous freedom of the ghosts, and ordained the means of expiation for those who had made a slip in the funeral ceremonies, or whose dead had been buried at sea or had died in a far country.

I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe.

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

NOTES TO LECTURE IV

[131] Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of the Kings.h.i.+p_, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kings.h.i.+p of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kings.h.i.+p held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian.

Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, _i.e._ the plebs of later times, lived under Mutterrecht.

[132] Aust, _Religion der Romer_, p. 212.

[133] In historical times the household deities were often represented by images of Greek type: _e.g._ the Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, _Rel. und Kult._ p. 147, and _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 95 foll., and 289. See also De Marchi, _La Religione nella vita privata_, i. p. 41 foll. and p. 90 foll.

[134] De Marchi, _op. cit._ i. 13 foll. In the ordinary and regular religion of the family the State, _i.e._ the pontifices, did not interfere; but they might do so in matters such as the succession of _sacra_, the care of graves, or the fulfilment of vows undertaken by private persons. See Cicero, _de Legibus_, ii. 19. 47.

[135] Mucius Scaevola, the great lawyer, defined _gentiles_ as those "qui eodem nomine sunt, qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt, quorum maiorum nemo servitutem servivit, qui capite non sunt deminuti," Cic. _Topica_, vi. 29. This is the practical view of a lawyer of the last century B.C., and does not take account of the _sacra gentilicia_, which had by that time decayed or pa.s.sed into the care of _sodalitates_: Marquardt, p. 132 foll.; De Marchi, ii. p. 3 foll. The notion of descent from a common ancestor is of course ideal, but none the less a factor in the life of the gens; it crops up, _e.g._, in Virgil, _Aen._ v. 117, 121, and Servius _ad loc._

[136] Crawley, _The Tree of Life_, p. 47.

[137] For the alleged extinction of the gens Pot.i.tia, and the legend connected with it, Livy i. 7, Festus 237.

[138] See Marquardt, _Privataltertumer_, p. 56, and note 6.

[139] There is, I believe, no doubt that the etymological affinities of the word _familia_ point to the idea of settlement and not that of kin; _e.g._ Oscan _Faama_, a house, and Sanscrit _dha_, to settle.

[140] The exact meaning and origin of the word has been much discussed. It is tempting to connect it with _pax_, _paciscor_, and make it a territory within whose bounds there is _pax_; see Rudorff, _Gromatici veteres_, ii.

239, and Nissen, _Italische Landeskunde_, ii. 8 foll.

[141] See Rudorff, _Grom. vet._ ii. 236 foll.; Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, iii. 116 foll.; Kornemann in _Klio_, vol.

v. (1905) p. 80 foll.; Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 1 foll.

[142] Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, iii. 22 foll.; Kornemann, _l.c._; Roby in _Dict. of Antiquities_, _s.v._ "Agrimetatio," p. 85. The view that there was freehold garden land attached to the homestead gains strength from a statement of Pliny (_N.H._ xix. 50) that the word used in the XII. Tables for villa, which was the word in cla.s.sical times for the homestead, was _hortus_, a garden, and that this was _heredium_, private property.

See Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, iii. 23. It would indeed be strange if the house had no land immediately attached to it; we know that in the Anglo-Saxon village community the villani, bordarii and cotagii, had their garden croft attached to their dwellings, apart from such strips as they might hold from the lord of the manor in the open fields. See Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, p. 148. For the _centuriatus ager_, Roby _l.c._ We have no direct knowledge of the system in the earliest times, but it is almost certain that it was old-Italian in outline, and not introduced by the Etruscans, as stated, _e.g._, by Deecke-Muller, _Etrusker_, ii. 128.

[143] For Latium this is proved by the sepulchral hut-urns found at Alba and also on the Esquiline. One of these in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford shows the construction well. See article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encyclopadie_; Helbig, _Die Italiker in der Poebene_, p. 50 foll. Later there was an opening in the roof.

[144] Von Duhn in _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, 1896, p. 125 foll., and article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa.

[145] This is Aust's admirable expression, _Religion der Romer_, p. 214.

[146] See the author's _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 242.

[147] Serv. _Aen._ i. 270; Marquardt, p. 126.

[148] _Ap. Gellium_, iv. 1. 17. For the sacredness of food and meals, see below (Lect. VIII. p. 172).

[149] See a paper by the author in _Cla.s.sical Rev._ vol.

x. (1896) p. 317, and references there given. Cp. the pa.s.sage of Servius quoted above (_Aen._ i. 730), where a boy is described as announcing at the daily meal that the G.o.ds were propitious. For the purity necessary I may refer to Hor. _Odes_, iii. 23 _ad fin._, "Immunis aram si tetigit ma.n.u.s," etc.

[150] _Primitive Culture_, i. 393.

[151] The feminine counterpart of Genius was Juno, of which more will be said later on. Each woman had her Juno; but this "other-soul" has little importance as compared with Genius.

[152] See J. B. Carter in Hastings' _Dict. of Religion and Ethics_, i. 462 foll. For Genius in general, Birt in _Myth. Lex._ s.v.; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 154 foll.; Stewart, _Myths of Plato_, p. 450, for the connexion of souls with ancestry.

[153] See the fifth of Plutarch's _Quaestiones Romanae_, and Dr. Jevons' interesting comments in his edition of Phil. Holland's translation, pp. xxii. and x.x.xv. foll.

Cp. the throwing the fetters of a criminal out by the roof of the Flamen's house.

[154] _Civ. Dei_, vi. 9. These are deities of the Indigitamenta; see below, p. 84.

[155] De Marchi, _La Religione_, etc. i. 188 foll.; Marquardt, _Privatleben der Romer_, p. 336, "la porte est la limite entre le monde etranger et le monde domestique" (A. van Gennep, _Rites de pa.s.sage_, p. 26, where other ill.u.s.trations are given).

[156] See below, Lect. XII. p. 281.

[157] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 96; Aust, _Rel. der Romer_, p.

117; Roscher in _Myth. Lex._ s.v. "Ja.n.u.s"; J. B. Carter, _Religion of Numa_, p. 13. Cp. Von Domaszewski in _Archiv_, 1907, p. 337.

[158] Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of Kings.h.i.+p_, p. 286 foll.; A. B. Cook in _Cla.s.sical Review_, 1904, p. 367 foll.

[159] _Gromat. vet._ i. 302, line 20 foll., describes the chapels, but without mentioning the Lares. Varro (_L.L._ vi. 25) supplies the name: "Compitalia dies attributus Laribus Compitalibus; ideo ubi viae competunt tum in competis sacrificatur." Cp. Wissowa, _R.K._ p.

148. But the nature of the land thus marked off is not clear to me, nor explained (for primitive times) by Wissowa in _Real-Encycl._, _s.vv._ "Compitum" and "Compitalia."

[160] "Enos Lases juvate." See Henzen, _Acta Fratr.

Arv._ p. 26 foll.

[161] Cato, _R.R._ 5. Cp. Dion. Hal. iv. 13. 2. In Cato 143 the vilica is to put a wreath on the focus on Kalends, Nones and Ides, and to pray to the Lar familiaris pro copia (at the compita?).