The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 8

But, in the third place, we must believe that at first, and indeed perhaps for ages, this very routine had an important psychological result in producing increased comfort, convenience, and confidence in the Roman's relations with the divine inhabitants of his city. A certain number of deities have taken up their abode within the walls of the city, and are as much its inhabitants, its citizens, as the human beings who live there; and all the relations between the divine and human citizens are regulated now by law, by a _ius divinum_, of which the calendar is a very important part. _Religio_, the old feeling of doubt and scruple, arising from want of knowledge in the individual, is still there; it is, in fact, the feeling which has given rise to all this organisation and routine, the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, as Cicero phrases it. But it must be already losing its strength, its life; it was, so to speak, a const.i.tutional weakness, and the _ius divinum_ is already beginning to act on it as a tonic. Doubt has pa.s.sed into fixed usage, tradition has given place to organisation. Time, place, procedure in all religious matters, are guaranteed by those skilled in the _ius divinum_; they know what to do as the festival of each deity comes round, and at the right time and place they do it with scrupulous attention to every detail. Thus the organisation of which the calendar is our best example would have as its first result the destruction of fear and doubt in the mind of the ordinary Roman; it would tend to kill, or at least to put to sleep, the _religio_ which was the original motive cause of this very organisation. As the State in our own day has a tendency to relieve families of such duties as the care and education of children, so the State at Rome relieved the family of constant anxiety about matters in which they were ever in danger from the spirit-world. The State and its authorities have taken the whole responsibility of adjusting the relations of the human and divine citizens.[207]

Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word; to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know, with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of wors.h.i.+p as clean and rational as that of the Homeric poems, which stands in such striking contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.[208] When we do read of any kind of grossness in wors.h.i.+p or the accompanying festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is _not_ among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the Subura.[209] We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei, if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;[210] on May 15, as we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_, possibly with the object of procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that _dies religiosi_ were not marked in the Fasti, _i.e._ days on which some uncomfortable feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the _mundus_ was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a doc.u.ment of religious law, not of _superst.i.tio_, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably means what is outside that religious law, outside the _ius divinum_; and it is a doc.u.ment of _religio_ only so far as it is meant to organise and carry out the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, the natural results of that feeling which the Romans called _religio_. It stands on exactly the same footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail with the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, and rigidly excluded all foreign and barbarous rites and superst.i.tions.

I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up the calendar as the fundamental charter of the _ius divinum_ must have had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to the deities who were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception.

The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims, which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the G.o.d (whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with him.[211] They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal settlers on the Palatine, and so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by means of beans,[212] seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of the _Golden Bough_,[213] is nothing more than the licence of the population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his _familia_; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever.

There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the _ius divinum_ was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded to;[214] it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged practice.[215]

Thus we may take it as highly probable that those who drew up the calendar had the deliberate intention of excluding from the State ritual, as far as was possible, everything in the nature of barbarism and magic. For the religious purposes of a people occupied in agriculture and war, and already beginning to develop some idea of law and order, there was no need of any religious rites except such as would serve, in decency and order, to propitiate the deities concerned with the fertilisation of man, beast, and crop, and with the safety and efficacy of the host in its struggle with the enemies of the city. The Roman people grew up, in their city life as in the life of the family, in self-restraint, dignity, and good order, confident in the course of _cura_ and _caerimonia_, itself decent and stately, if soulless, which the religious authorities had drawn up for them.

We should naturally like to know something about those authorities, who thus placed the religion of the State on a comparatively high level of ritualistic decency, if not of theological subtlety. The Romans themselves attributed the work to a priest-king, Numa Pompilius, and probably their instinct was a right one. Names matter little in such matters; but there is surely something in the universal Roman tradition of a great religious legislator, something too, it may be, in the tradition that he was a Sabine, a representative of the community on the Quirinal which had been embodied in the Roman city before the calendar was drawn up, and of the st.u.r.dy, serious stock of central Italy, which retained its _virtus_ longer than any other Italian people.[216] We are quite in the dark as to all this, unless we can put any kind of confidence in the traditional belief of the Romans themselves. But there is one point on which I should like to make a suggestion--a new one so far as I know. Numa was said to have been the first Flamen Dialis; but that is absolutely impossible, for the ancient taboos on that priesthood would have made it impossible for him to become supreme legislator.

Evidently this Flamen, who could hardly leave his own house, might never leave the city, and was at every turn hedged in by restrictions on his activity, was a survival of those magician-kings who make rain and do other useful things, but would lose their power if they were exposed to certain contingencies; the number of possible contingencies increases till the unfortunate owner of the powers becomes powerless by virtue of the care so painfully taken of him.[217] The priest of Jupiter and his taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber, he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where Jupiter was wors.h.i.+pped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.[218]

If there be any truth in this--and I believe it to be a legitimate inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent state of taboo--then I think we may see a great religious change in the era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas of the duty and destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman fas.h.i.+on, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kings.h.i.+p, but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.

NOTES TO LECTURE V.

[185] Kornemann, _op. cit._ p. 87; Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, iii. p. 790, note 1. For the festival of the Septimontium, Varro, _L.L._ vi. 24; Plutarch, _Quaest.

Rom._ 69; Fowler, _R.F._ p. 265 foll. This festival does not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi, sed montanorum modo" (Varro, _l.c._). There are some interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's _Evolution of the Aryan_ (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special reference to Rome.

[186] Von Duhn in _J.H.S._ xvi. 126 foll. The latest research (Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, _s.v._ "Etrusker," p.

747) concludes that the arrival of the Etruscans on the west coast of Italy cannot be safely put earlier than the eighth century.

[187] Hulsen-Jordan, _Rom. Topogr._ iii. 153. In a brief but masterly paper in the publications of the _American School at Rome_, 1908, p. 173 foll., J. B. Carter deals with the whole problem of the pomoerium and the pre-Servian city.

[188] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 27.

[189] In _C.I.L._ i.^2, p. 297 foll. See _R.F._ p. 14 foll.

[190] See the Fasti in _R.F._ p. 21 foll.; or in Wissowa, _R.K._, at end of the book.

[191] _R.F._ p. 38 foll. Marindin's article "Salii,"

_Dict. of Antiqq._, is very useful and sensible. There is little doubt that the dress and armour of the Salii represented that of the primitive Latin warrior, calculated to frighten away evil spirits as well as enemies, and that their dances in procession had some object of this kind. It is noticeable that there were two gilds or collegia of them belonging to the Palatine and Quirinal cities respectively; and they are also found at Tibur, Alba, Lanuvium, and other Latin cities.

[192] Or 15th (Ides), according to the conjecture of Wissowa; see _R.F._ p. 44 and _R.K._ p. 131. It is almost incredible that this should originally have been on a day of even number, contrary to the universal rule of the Fasti.

[193] See below, p. 212 foll., for further consideration of this so-called purification.

[194] _R.K._ p. 131.

[195] See below, p. 217.

[196] _R.K._ p. 131.

[197] _Popular Religion and Folklore of India_, ii. 51.

For the sacredness of the number three and its multiples, see Diels, _Sibyllinische Blatter_, p. 40 foll.; but he limits it too much to chthonic religious ritual. See also H. Usener, "Dreizahl," in _Rheinisches Museum_, vol. 58, pp. 1 foll., 161 foll., and 321 foll.

There is a summary of the results of these papers in Gruppe's _Mythologische Literatur_, 1898-1905, p. 360 foll. I may also refer to my friend Prof. Goudy's very interesting _Trichotomy in Roman Law_ (Oxford, 1910), p.

8 foll.

[198] By von Domaszewski in _Archiv_ for 1907, p. 333 foll. The learned author's reasoning is often based on mere hypotheses as to the meaning of the festivals or the G.o.ds concerned in them, and his ideas as to the agricultural features of the months July, August, December seem to me doubtful; but the paper is one that all students of the calendar must reckon with.

[199] Marquardt, _Privatleben_, pp. 459 and 569 foll.

[200] For the festivals mentioned in the following paragraphs see _R.F._, _s.v._, and Wissowa, _R.K._, section 63.

[201] "St. George and the Parilia," in _Revue des etudes ethnographiques et sociologiques_ for Jan. 1908. I owe my knowledge of this admirable study to the kindness of its author.

[202] Frazer, _G.B._ ii. 318 foll.

[203] Varro, _L.L._ v. 64, says, "Ab _satu_ dictus Saturnus." And in Augustine (_Civ. Dei_, vi. 8) he is quoted as holding the opinion "quod pertineat Saturnus ad semina, quae in terram de qua oriuntur iterum recidunt." He was probably the _numen_ of the seed-sowing (Saeturnus), and as his festival comes after the end of sowing, we may presume that he was the _numen_ of the sown as well as of the unsown seed. In the article "Saturnus" in Roscher's _Lexicon_, which has appeared since the above note was written, Wissowa provisionally accepts Varro's etymology.

[204] Festus, p. 245a, "Publica sacra quae publico sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis, curiis, sacellis." See article "Sacra" in _Dict. of Antiqq._ ii. 577.

[205] "Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a perfect autocracy" (_Select Charters_, Introduction, p.

19).

[206] The annalists believed that the publication first took place in the year 304 B.C.: Livy ix. 46. Mommsen (_Chronologie_, p. 31) thought it possible that it had already been done by the Decemvirs in one of the two last of the XII. Tables, but again withdrawn. The object of keeping the Fasti secret was, of course, to control the times available for legal and political business.

[207] This paragraph is abridged from a pa.s.sage in the author's paper in the _Hibbert Journal_ for 1907, p.

848.

[208] See _Anthropology and the Cla.s.sics_ (Oxford, 1908), p. 44.

[209] _R.F._ p. 241 foll.

[210] Wissowa holds that it dates from the third century B.C.: Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ "Argei." I endeavoured to refute this view in the _Cla.s.sical Review_ for 1902, p. 115 foll., and Dr. Wissowa criticised my criticism in his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 222. It is dealt with at length in _R.F._ p. 111 foll. See below, p. 321 foll.

[211] This is not exactly the view expressed in _R.F._ p. 315 foll., where I was inclined to adopt that of Mannhardt that the laughing symbolised the return to life after sacrificial death. I am now disposed to think of it as parallel with the ecstasy of the Pythoness and other inspired priests, or the s.h.i.+vering and convulsive movements which denote that a human being is "possessed"

by a G.o.d or spirit. See Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 174.

Mannhardt's view seems, however, to gain support from Pausanias' description of the ordeal he underwent himself at the cave of Trophonius, after which he could laugh again: Paus. ix. 39. See also Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 580.

Deubner in _Archiv_, 1910, p. 501.

[212] _R.F._ p. 109; Ov. _Fasti_, v. 421 foll. Ovid's account is of a private rite in the house, as elsewhere he tells us of things done by private persons on festival days. We do not know whether there was any public ritual for these days. For further discussion of the contrast between the two festivals of the dead, see below, Lect. XVII. p. 393.

[213] _G.B._ iii. 138 foll. The attempt to connect the so-called Saturnalia of the army of the Danube in the third century A.D. with the early practice of Roman Saturnalia seems to me to fail entirely, even after reading Prof. c.u.mont's paper in the _Revue de philologie_, 1897, p. 133 foll. I should imagine that c.u.mont would now admit that the Saturn who was sacrificed on the Danube as described in the _Martyrdom of St. Dasius_ must have been of Oriental origin, and that the soldiers concerned were in no sense Roman or Italian. For the h.e.l.lenisation of the Saturnalia, see Wissowa in Roscher's _Lexicon_, _s.v._ "Saturnus," p.

432. Wissowa, I may note, does not believe in the accuracy of the account of the "Martyrdom."

[214] Nothing, that is, in the regular ritual of the Roman State--except in so far as the killing of a criminal who was _sacer_ to a G.o.d can be so regarded; and the only instance of any kind that can be quoted is that of the two pairs of Gaulish and Greek men and women who in the stress of the second Punic war and afterwards were buried alive, as it was said, in the Forum Boarium.

Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 355 and notes. I shall return to this in Lecture XIV.

[215] The earliest mention of the slaying of a victim (_bestiarius_) to Jupiter is in Minucius Felix, _Octav._ 22 and 30, _i.e._ towards the end of the second century A.D. or even later. Cp. Tertull. _Apol._ 9, Lactantius i. 21. I do not go so far as to say with Wissowa (p.

109, note 3) that this story is "ganz gewiss apokryph,"

but I take it as simply a case of degeneracy under the influence of the amphitheatre and of Orientalism.

[216] For Numa see Schwegler, _Rom. Gesch._ i. 551 foll.

[217] See Dr. Frazer's most recent account of this subject, in his _Lectures on the Early History of the Kings.h.i.+p_, chaps, iii.-v. Prof. Ridgeway's idea that the Flamen Dialis was really a Numan inst.i.tution is of course simply impossible, and the arguments he founds on it fall to the ground. Ovid, probably reflecting Varro, speaks of the Flamen Dialis as belonging to the Pelasgian religion, which at least means that he was aware of the extreme antiquity of the office; _Fasti_, ii. 281. Dr. Dollinger (_The Gentile and the Jew_, vol.

ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see in this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of ceremonial ordinances."