Appendix
ATTENTION: This Appendix was originally written in 1931! It contains OUTDATED information and language. It also contains imperialist/colonial/racist language that may make some readers uncomfortable.
The year of ten months (i.28).—According to Roman tradition, Romulus instituted a year of ten months, with a total of 304 days; the months began with March and ended with December. Afterwards two months, January and February, were added, making a total of 355 days, approximately a lunar year. O. E. Hartmann thought that in the old days the time from midwinter to spring, during which the labours of the husbandmen were for the most part suspended, and nature herself appeared to be dormant, if not dead, was looked on as a period of rest, and was therefore excluded from the calendar, the object of which was to regulate the activities of the people during the remainder of the year. This explanation I regard as probably the true one. Analogies had suggested the explanation to me, before I learnt that it had been anticipated. The calendar in that form must date from a prehistoric age, when the Latins were still a rude people, subsisting mainly by agriculture. To all appearances our remote ancestors recognized only lunar months, which they allowed to run on without attempting to fit them into the solar year.
Take the Negro tribes of S. Nigeria, described by Mr. P. Amaury Talbot. “Time was measured by the moon…This lunar month was divided into weeks of four or eight days in the west…The subdivisions into weeks in all likelihood originated chiefly from the necessity of differentiating between the days on which the various markets were held…The fitting of the weeks into months is by no means perfect…As a rule, those months from about Nov.—Dec. to Jan.—Feb., when no work was being done, were thought negligible and hardly included. In fact, the word translated by our ‘year’ more often meant the season…There was usually no thought about the number of months in the year.” Among the Yoruba of this region the three months February, March, April, are generally given no specific name.
The African calendar resembles the old Roman in its system of an eight-day week based on the recurrence of markets; these market-days correspond exactly to the nundinae. On Roman market-days, as on the Jewish Sabbath, all ordinary work in the fields was strictly forbidden: the same rule is observed on the market-days in S. Nigeria.
The parallel with Rome is not confined to Africa. We may follow it, for example, to New Zealand. An English missionary (Rev. W. Yate) in the early part of the nineteenth century, described their customs from personal observation. “Nine months of the year, a great portion of the natives are employed on their grounds; and there are only two months in which they can say they have nothing to do…These two months are not in the calendar: they do not reckon them: nor are they in any way accounted of. ‘It is a time,’ the natives say, ‘not worthy to be reckoned: as it is only spent in visiting, feasting, talking, playing and sleeping.’” In the Triobrand Islands, to the east of New Guinea, most mature men can count up to eight months and sometimes up to ten, only a few specially trained can enumerate correctly twelve months. The period of nameless months is the time when work in the gardens is finished. There are some indications that in other parts of the world the original calendar reckoned only ten months in the year. Such a system is found among the Chams of Indo-China, and in some islands of the Indian Archipelago. A division of the year into ten parts, we can hardly call them months, is found also among peoples who earn a precarious subsistence by hunting, fishing, and collecting wild fruits and roots.
There is some ground for thinking that the Anglo-Saxons at one time recognized, or at least named, only ten months of the year: for according to Bede they had only one name for December and January, and only one name for June and July.
Janus (i. 89).—Some of the most eminent authorities have agreed in deriving the name from ianua, “a door.” But there are difficulties in the way. In the first place, so far from Janus being called after ianua, “a door,” it appears probable, if not certain, that ianua was called after him; and if that was so, it seems to follow that Janus led a separate and independent life before he came to be especially associated with doors. The reason for thinking so is this. The word ianua as applied to a door has nothing to correspond to it in any Indo-European language: but the regular word for door is the same in all the languages of the Aryan family from India to Ireland. Why, when the Romans were in possession of this good old name for a door, did they invent another and call it ianua? The word has the appearance of being an adjectival form derived from the noun Ianus. I conjecture that it may have been customary to set up an image or symbol of Janus at the principal door of the house in order to place the entrance under the protection of the great god that, as we shall see immediately, Janus appears originally to have been. A door thus guarded might be known as the ianua foris, that is a Januan door, and the phrase might in time be abridged into ianua, the noun foris being understood but not expressed.
There seems to be good reason to think that the original form of the god's name was Dianus, the initial DI having been corrupted into J, just as the original Diovis and Diespiter were corrupted into Jovis and Jupiter. Similarly the name of Diana, which is the feminine form of Dianus, appears to have been corrupted in vulgar pronunciation into Jana: for Varro tells us that in reference to the days of the month country people spoke of the waxing and waning Jana, where educated folk would seemingly have said Diana, meaning the moon. In Greek it is certain that the original DI was similarly corrupted into Z, as is proved by the name of Zeus, for the original DI reappears in the genitive, dative, and accusative DIOS, DII, DIA. Similarly ZAN, an old form of Zeus, stands for an original DIAN, which answers exactly to the Latin DIANUS, JANUS. Further, at Dodona, his most ancient sanctuary, Zeus shared his temple with Dione, in whom the learned mythologist Apollodorus discerned the first wife of Zeus, the wife whom that fickle and faithless god afterwards exchanged for Hera. His Italian counterpart gave proof of much greater conjugal fidelity by always keeping to his first wife, Juno, whose old name, to judge by that of her Greek counterpart Dione, must have been Diono. Compared with the kindred Sanscrit name Dyaus, the old German Zio, and so forth, all these names are ultimately derived from an Indo-European root DI, meaning “bright” and as the Sanscrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, and the Latin Jupiter were undoubtedly personifications of the sky, a very strong presumption is raised that Janus also, whose name cannot without violence be separated from theirs, was in origin also a god of the sky, a simple duplicate of Dyaus, Zeus, and Jupiter. The ancients themselves seem to have been sensible of the kinship, not to say identity, of Janus and Jupiter. An inscription records the dedication of an offering to Jupiter Dianus, as if Jupiter and Dianus (Janus) were one and the same. And we know from the good testimony of Varro that some of the ancients identified Janus with the sky ; in the fourteenth book of his Divine Antiquities that most learned of Roman antiquaries affirmed that among the Etruscans in particular the name Janus was used as equivalent to the sky. We shall do well to acquiesce in this opinion of some ancient authorities, strongly supported as it is by the conclusions of modern philology.
But why was Janus regularly represented with two heads? The question is perhaps even more difficult to answer than that of the original nature of the deity. Elsewhere I have conjectured that this curious mode of representation originated in a custom of placing an image of the god at gates and doors as a sort of divine sentinel to guard them from the passage of evil powers, and in support of this conjecture I have cited the double-headed idol which the Bush negroes of Surinam regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The idol consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar dangles a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the gateway of negro villages in Surinam bears a close resemblance to the double-headed images of Janus, which, grasping a staff in his right hand and a key in his left, stood sentinel at Roman archways (iani i. 95, 99), and it seems reasonable to suppose that in both cases the heads facing two ways are to be similarly explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who kept his eye on spiritual foes both before and behind, and stood ready to bludgeon them on the spot.
Lupercalia (ii. 267).—The priesthood of the Luperci included two colleges, the Quinctiales or Quinctilii, and the Fabiani or Fabii. In 44 b.c. a third college, called the Julii, was established by Julius Caesar. The sanctuary which was the centre of the sacred functions of the Luperci was known as the Lupercal ; it appears to have been situated at the south-west foot of the Palatine hill. It was traditionally said to have been a great cave at the foot of the hill, with springs of water welling up under the rocks, and overarched by a thick grove of oaks. Inthat sylvan scene the she-wolf is said to have suckled Romulus and Remus. In the Lupercal there formerly grew a fig-tree called the Ficus Ruminalis.
According to the testimony of the ancients the Lupercalia was essentially a purificatory rite. In particular it was a purification of the ancient city on the Palatine, of which the boundary, as it was believed to have been fixed by Romulus, continued to be marked out by stones down to Imperial times. At their annual festival the Luperci appear to have run round the boundary of the ancient city. Certainly they started from the Lupercal and made a circuit, in the course of which they ran up the Sacred Way and down again, which Christians in the time of Augustine absurdly interpreted as a reminiscence of the Deluge, the Luperci representing the sinners who on that occasion ran up and down the mountains as the waters of the Flood rose or fell. Moreover, Dionysius of Hallicarnassus expressly affirms that in the time of Romulus the Lupercalia were celebrated by young men, who, starting from the Lupercal (which he calls the Lyceum), ran round the village on the Palatine, clad only in girdles made from the skins of the sacrificial victims; and he adds that the rite was a traditional purification observed by the villagers in the time of Romulus and continued down to the writer’s own day. The skins of which the girdles were made were those of goats which had been sacrificed. At the festival the Luperci also sacrificed a dog, which was deemed a purificatory rite. With strips of the skins of the sacrificed goats the Luperci struck at all whom they met, but especially at women, who held out both hands to receive the blows, persuaded that this was a safe mode of securing offspring and an easy delivery. The goatskin with which they were struck was called Juno's cloak, a name which becomes intelligible when we remember that in her great temple at Lanuvium the goddess was represented clad in a goatskin as in a cloak. Hence it is not surprising to read, that according to a certain Anysius in his treatise on the months, the rites performed by the Luperci in February aimed at promoting the growth of the crops; for in the minds of many people at an early stage of culture the fertility of women is closely bound up with the fertility of the earth, and the same causes which promote or hinder the one are thought to promote or hinder the other, a vital connexion being supposed to subsist between the union of the human sexes on the one hand and the fruitfulness of the ground on the other. A hint of this connexion is perhaps given by the part which the Vestal Virgins played at the Lupercalia. Between the 7th and 14th of May, on alternate days, the three eldest Vestals collected ears of spelt in reapers' baskets, and with their own hands roasted and ground them. From this spelt, mixed with salt, they provided the sacrificial meal on three days of the year, namely at the Lupercalia on January 15, at the festival of Vesta (the Vestalia) on June 9, and on the Ides (13th) of September. The name of Creppi or Crepi popularly applied to the Luperci appears to be an old form of capri, “he-goats,” and to have been suggested by the goatskins which they wore and which they carried in their hands.
By far the most famous celebration of the Lupercalia was that which fell on the 15th of February, 44 B.C., exactly one month before the assassination of Caesar. The dictator was then at the height of his power and at the summit of human glory. A golden throne had been set for him on the Rostra, and there, clad in the gorgeous costume of a general at his triumph, he sat watching the antics of the Luperci in the Forum below. It chanced that his friend Mark Antony was his colleague in the consulship and also Master of the new college of Julian Luperci. In that capacity Antony, naked and glistening with oil after the fashion of the Luperci, came running into the Forum, the crowd opening to let him pass. He made straight for the Rostra, and being hoisted on to the platform by his colleagues, he advanced to Caesar, and offered to place on the dictator’s head a diadem twined with laurel. In the crowd there was some slight applause but more hissing. When Caesar pushed the bauble away, the crowd applauded. Again Antony presented the crown, and again Caesar refused it, whereupon the whole multitude broke into a tumult of applause. Caesar frowned, and standing up from his golden chair he pulled his robe from his neck and offered his throat to anyone who pleased to cut it. His friends placed the crown on one of his statues, but when the tribunes tore it down, the spectators cheered them. According to Cicero, who may have witnessed the scene, Antony was drunk as well as naked when he attempted to crown Caesar king of Rome.
According to Ovid, the god whom the Luperci served was Faunus, a deity of the woodlands and of cattle, whose festival fell on the 5th of December, when the flocks and herds skipped in his honour on the greensward, and in the forest the fallen leaves “yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,” made a soft carpet for the light footsteps of the amorous god as he pursued the nymphs among the trees. He was thought to keep the wolves from the lambs, a function appropriate to the Lupercalia, if, as some have thought, the prime aim of that festival was to guard the flocks and herds from the prowling wolf. But according to Livy the god whom the Luperci honoured was named Inuus. The ancients identified this Inuus with the Greek god Pan, and both of them with Faunus; otherwise little or nothing is known about him, except that in Italy he was honoured, sometimes with yearly, sometimes with monthly festivals. An image of the supposed god, what- ever he may have been called, stood in the Lupercal; it represented the deity in the costume of the Luperci, that is, naked with a girdle of goatskin about his loins.
The primitive character of the ritual and of the ideas implied in it suggests that originally the Lupercalia was rather a magical than a religious rite, and hence that it did not involve a reference to any particular deity, but was simply one of those innumerable ceremonies whereby men have attempted, in all ages and in all countries, by their own efforts, without divine assistance, to repel the powers of evil and so to liberate the powers of good, thus promoting the fertility at once of man, of beast, and of the earth. These ceremonies commonly take the form of a periodic, generally of an annual, expulsion of evils, which are usually conceived in the form of demons or ghosts having forcibly driven out these dangerous intruders, the community fancies itself safe and happy for the time being, till the recurrence of the old troubles seems to require a fresh application of the old remedy. Viewed in their essential character as a riddance of evil, such ceremonies are properly called purifications; and the ancients, as we have seen, commonly explained the Lupercalia as a purification, in which they appear to have been substantially right. The late W. Warde Fowler, our genial and learned interpreter of Roman religion, happily compared the Lupercalia to the annual custom of “beating the bounds,” which is still kept up in some parts of England; and he suggested that the peeled wands carried by the bound-beaters at Oxford on Ascension Day may once have been used in the same way as the thongs of goatskin wielded by the Luperci on their rounds. The theory has much to commend it, and its author may have been quite right in describing the Lupercalia as “at the same time a beating of the bounds and a rite of purification and fertilization.”
Mannhardt proposed to explain the title lupercus, “wolf-goat” as signifying the union of two priestly colleges, of which the one personated wolves and the other goats, and of which the members called themselves accordingly Wolves and Goats respectively. Under these two names, according to him, the priests represented the Spirit of Vegetation in animal form, for down to this day in European folk-lore both wolves and goats are very often conceived to be embodiments of the Corn-spirit. In point of fact, as we have seen, the Luperci were divided into two colleges, the Quinctiales and the Fabii, of which the Quinctiales were associated with Romulus and the Fabii with Remus.
This ingenious theory, though it is not free from difficulties, seems open to less serious objections than either of its rivals, and we may provisionally acquiesce in it till a better has been suggested. It has, indeed, been objected to it that the festival appears to have been a purely pastoral one, and that it was recognized as such by the ancients; for Cicero refers contemptuously to the college of the Luperci as “a sort of wild and thoroughly pastoral and rustic brotherhood of regular Wolves (germanorum Lupercorum), which was formed in the woods before the institution of civilized life and law”; and Plutarch, speaking of the Lupercalia, observes that “many write that it was of old a festival of shepherds, and it somewhat resembles the Arcadian Lycaea.” To this it may be retorted that in the ancient accounts of the festival which have come down to us there are references to the crops but none to the flocks and herds. Therefore, so far as the balance of evidence is concerned, it inclines rather against than in favour of the pastoral theory of the Lupercalia. However, the two apparently inconsistent theories are reconciled by the view that the festival was one of purification, which, by ridding the community of the evil powers of barrenness and disease that had infested it in the past year, set free the kindly powers of nature to perform their genial task of promoting the fertility alike of women, of cattle, and of the fields.
Regifugium (ii. 685).—The ceremony called the Flight of the King is marked on February 24. All that we know about the ritual is contained in a statement of Plutarch, who says that after offering an ancient sacrifice in the Comitium, the King of the Sacred Rites fled hastily from the Forum. The ancients appear to have generally interpreted the ceremony as an annual celebration of the flight of Tarquin the Proud. In modern times, scholars are generally agreed in rejecting the old explanation, but they are by no means agreed as to what to substitute for it. On the analogy of certain Greek rites, in which the sacrificer fled after the sacrifice, it has been suggested that the animal sacrificed by the king in the Comitium was a holy animal, and that his flight was a sort of apology for the sacrilegious sacrifice which he had offered. This theory was first proposed tentatively by Lobeck. Another suggestion is that the sacrifice was a sin-offering, and that the victim, regarded as a scapegoat to which the sin had been transferred, became an object of fear and abhorrence from which the sacrificer sought to save himself by flight. On this theory the sacrifice was one of the purificatory rites from which the month of February took its name.
I formerly conjectured that the rite may have been a survival of a race which in ancient times the real king of Rome had annually to run for the purpose of proving his physical fitness to discharge the duties of his office. But since the Flight of the King on February 24 always followed after the intercalary month, which was regularly inserted after February 23, I have been led, in the course of this work, to suggest a somewhat different explanation of the rite in question, namely, that the king who fled from the Comitium may originally have been a temporary king who was invested with a nominal authority during the intercalary period, whether of a month or of eleven or twelve days, while the power of the real king was in abeyance; and that at the end of his brief and more or less farcical reign he was obliged to take to his heels lest a worse thing should befall him. The theory fits in with the view, which seems to be widespread, that an intercalary period is an abnormal time during which ordinary rules do not hold and consequently the ordinary government is suspended and replaced by the temporary sway of a mock king, who at the end of his nominal reign has sometimes to pay with his life for his brief tenure of a crown. On this view the king who fled from the Comitium on February 24 may be compared with the mock King of the Saturnalia who held sway during the festival of Saturn in December; and the analogy between the two would be still closer if we suppose that the mock King of the Saturnalia originally personated Saturn himself and was put to death in the character of the god at the end of a month’s reign of revelry and licence; for we are expressly informed that such a mode of celebrating the Saturnalia was actually observed by the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower Moesia in the early years of the fourth century of our era, before the establishment of Christianity by Constantine. If that was so, we must apparently conclude that the rude soldiers on the frontiers of the empire retained or revived, in all their crude barbarity, the original features of the festival which had long been effaced in the civilized society of the capital, leaving behind them only a tradition of Saturn’s earthly reign and of the human victims that had been immolated on his altars. But if the representative of Saturn was formerly put to death at the Saturnalia, it may well be that the Flight of the mock King on February 24 was a mitigation of an older custom which compelled him to end his life with his reign. If the analogy here suggested between the King of the Saturnalia and the King of the Sacred Rites (the Sacrificial King) should prove to be well founded, we should be confronted with the curious coincidence of the reign of a mock king at the end both of the old and of the new Roman year, the King of the Sacred Rites reigning at the end of the old Roman year in February and the King of the Saturnalia reigning at the end of the new Roman year in December. How this duplication, if such indeed it was, is to be explained, it would be premature to speculate. As both ceremonies probably had their root in the necessity of regulating the course of the agricultural year for the benefit of farmers, we might suppose that the duplication either sprang from the union of two peoples with two different calendars, which were combined in the new system, or that it originated in successive attempts to bring the calendar more into accord with the conflicting claims of science and religion. As any systematic attempt to harmonize the solar and lunar years by intercalation betokens a fairly advanced state of culture, we must apparently conclude that an Intercalary King, who mediated, as it were, between Sun and Moon, was a later invention than a human Saturn who gave his life to quicken the crops. But these are hardly more than idle guesses.
Mars (iii. 1).—Though Mars has been most commonly conceived both in antiquity and in modern times as a god of war, there are good grounds for thinking that originally this was not his only nor even his principal function. In his treatise on farming, Cato the Elder, a pattern Roman of the olden time, puts into the mouth of the farmer a prayer to Father Mars that he would ward off disease, bad weather, and other calamities from the farm; that he would cause the fruits of the earth, the corn, the vines, and the copses to grow and prosper; that he would keep the shepherds and the cattle safe; and that he would bestow health and strength on the farmer himself, his family and household; and in order to induce the deity to grant his prayer, the farmer begged Father Mars to accept the sacrifice of a pig, a sheep and a bull, which were first led in procession round the fields. Further, Cato instructed the farmer how to make a vow and an offering to Mars Silvanus for the cattle, in order that the animals should be well and strong. Thus we may safely conclude that Mars was the god to whom above all others the Roman farmer looked for help in promoting the growth of the crops and preserving the health of man and beast. We can therefore understand why the Arval Brethren, whose special function was “to make the fields bear fruit,” should have addressed their solemn prayers principally to Mars. Scholars differ as to the exact way in which this side of his nature is to be reconciled with his warlike character. Perhaps the view of William Ramsay comes as near the truth as any. He wrote: “We must bear in mind that when Italy was portioned out among a multitude of small independent tribes, many of them differing from each other in origin and language, forays must have been as common among neighbouring states as they were in the days of our ancestors on the English border and the Highland frontier. The husbandman would be compelled to grasp the sword with one hand while he guided the plough with the other, and would be often forced to peril life and limb to save the produce of his toil from the spoiler. In such a state of society it is little wonderful that the Deity of the rustic should have presented a mixed character, and have been worshipped as one who could protect his votaries from every form of danger to which they were exposed.”
Ovid was unquestionably right in believing that the worship of Mars had been common to the Latin and other Italian peoples before the foundation of Rome.
Under the month of March the rustic calendars record “a sacred rite in honour of Mamurius” (Sacrum Mamurio), and under March 14 the calendar of Philocalus records the Mamuralia, that is, the festival of Mamurius. In their songs the Salii, that is, the Leapers or Dancers (from salire, “to leap,” “to dance”), made mention of a certain Mamurius Veturius, which Varro interpreted to mean memoria vetus, “old memory.” But a legendary or mythical explanation of the words was given by Ovid himself later on in this book. To this tale a remarkable addition is made by Joannes Lydus, a writer of the sixth century A.D. He tells us that, lest the shields (ancilia) which had fallen from heaven should be worn out by constant use, the craftsman Mamurius made other shields in their likeness, and that misfortunes followed the disuse of the ancient shields; so Mamurius was beaten with rods and driven out of the city, in memory whereof on the Ides of March (March 15) a man, wrapped up in goatskins, was led about and beaten with long slender rods. From this account, combined with the mention of Mamurius Veturius in the Song of the Salii, we may infer, with some probability, that every year, in the month of March, a man wrapped up in goatskins and called Mamurius Veturius was beaten with rods by the Salii and driven out of the city. The day appears from the entry in the calendar of Philocalus to have been the fourteenth, which went by the name of Mamuralia, and not the fifteenth, as stated by Joannes Lydus. Now Mamurius was associated with the Oscan land; perhaps he was thought to be driven away to the Oscan land to die, for Propertius prayed that the Oscan earth might lie light on the cunning hands of Mamurius, who wrought in bronze, and Mamers was the Oscan form of Mars. Further, as we have seen, Varro explained the name Veturius as equivalent to vetus, “old.” Hence it is a plausible conjecture that Mamurius Veturius means “the Old Mars,” and that the ceremony of driving his personal representative out of Rome on the 14th of March, that is on the eve of the full moon (the Ides) of the first month, was intended to assist the growth of vegetation in the new year, at the commencement of spring, by getting rid of the withered vegetation of the old year; for Mars, as we have seen, was originally a deity of vegetation as well as of war. Thus interpreted the ceremony is analogous to the Slavonic ceremony of “Carrying out Death” in spring.
The original twelve Salii or dancing priests are said to have been instituted by Numa to minister to Mars Gradivus, the Marching Mars. Afterwards twelve more Salii were appointed by King Tullus Hostilius. The original twelve Salii were called the Palatine Salii, because their chapel was on the Palatine hill. The later twelve Salii were called the Colline or Agonalian or Agonensian Salii; their chapel was on the Quirinal hill; hence they were also known as the Quirinal Salii. All the Salii wore embroidered tunics, girt with bronze belts, purple-edged cloaks, and high conical caps; they had swords girt at their sides, and each man bore in his right hand a spear, or rather staff or truncheon, and in his left hand one of the sacred shields (ancilia). Thus arrayed they used to go through the city for many days in the month of March, visiting the Forum, the Capitol, and many other places both public and private, dancing solemnly in measured time, chanting their ancient hymns, and clashing their staves against their shields. In March the festival lasted for thirty days. In the city there were stations (mansiones), where the Salii halted on their march, probably for the night, and stored their arms. At these stations the Salii refreshed themselves after their labours by banqueting in a style of magnificence which became proverbial. In ordinary times, when the shields were not in use, they were kept in the sacristry (sacrarium) of Mars; when war was declared, the general in command entered the sacristry, moved the shields, and said, “Mars, awake!” It is said that before the Cimbrian war, when for the second time in her history Rome was put in deadly peril by the Gauls, the shields in the sacristry were heard to stir and clang, as if impatient for the signal to march. However, it does not appear that the shields were ever carried with the army to battle, though the Salii themselves were free to perform military service abroad.
The Salii were not peculiar to Rome. Similar colleges of dancing priests bearing the same name were found in other Italian cities, for example, at Tibur, where they served Hercules instead of Mars, at Anagnia, and in cities beyond the Po, such as Patavium (Padua) and Sicinum.
I have suggested that the dancing procession of the armed Salii in March may have been intended to rout out and expel the demons that had accumulated in the city during the past year, especially the demons of blight and infertility, who might otherwise check the growth of the crops in spring. At the time of sowing the seed the Khonds, a wild tribe of India, drive out the “evil spirits, spoilers of the seed,” from every house in the village; the expulsion is effected by young men, who beat each other and strike the air violently with long sticks. At Whydah in West Africa, when the king's lands were to be hoed and sowed, the people went to the fields singing and dancing, half of them carrying their farm-tools and half of them “armed as in a day of battle.” Arrived at the scene of their labours they worked to the sound of musical instruments, and returning at evening danced before the king’s palace. A French traveller has described how at Timbo in Guinea men hoed the ground for sowing to the chant of women, while between the diggers and the singers a man armed with a musket danced, brandishing his weapon, and two others danced pirouetting and smiting the earth with their hoes; and we are told that “all that is necessary for exorcizing the spirits and causing the grain to grow.” On the first day when the Barundi of East Africa begin to hoe the fields, a sorcerer dances in front of them with cries and gesticulations “to ban the spirits and bless the sowing.”
If this interpretation of the Salii is correct, their dances were not war-dances in the ordinary sense of the word, and their weapons were not directed against any human foes. They waged war on demons: it was against these invisible enemies that they carried their arms: it was these dreadful beings that they essayed to terrify by the clash of their batons on their shields. The skin-clad man whom they beat and probably drove out of the city was, on this hypothesis, only an embodiment of the legion of spirits swarming in the air, especially the outworn spirit of vegetation of the past year, who was driven away that he might make room for a youthful and vigorous successor, the new Mars, who was thought to be born on the 1st of March. The view that the weapons they carried and the clangour they made were directed against spiritual, not human foes, can be supported by analogies in many parts of the world, where swords are brandished, guns fired, metal clashed, and drums beaten for the purpose of expelling evil spirits. To take a single example, the Eghap, a tribe of the Central Cameroons in West Africa, believe that illness is caused by the ghosts of persons who have left no relatives behind them. Hence during a time of sickness these troublesome spirits are driven away and as it is believed that the only people whom the spirits fear are the old men who play the sacred instruments, the operation of banishing ghosts falls to the lot of these venerable musicians. “When all the preparations have been made, the sacred instrument men gather in the head-chief's compound. Here three of them play lustily on drums for about fifteen minutes. At a given signal all of them spring into the air and rush through the narrow opening of the mat fence surrounding the head-chief's compound, bellowing like cattle. They beat the fencing, stamp on the ground, and strike the drums with great vigour. All those people in the town who are supposed to be controlled by evil spirits rush about in great agitation, foaming at the mouth, with their eyes wide open and staring. In the market-place the men who are supposed to drive the evil ghosts away divide into five sections. At the head of each is a drummer, followed first by a man with a whisk, and then by a number of men armed with spears. A dance is then held, in which the performers spring high into the air, some of them with stalks of elephant-grass (mbere) in their hands to drive the ghosts away. No one is allowed to leave his compound while this is going on, and complete silence reigns over the town. Whatever appears, whether human beings or animals, will be at once caught by the evil ghosts.”
In harmony with this theory of the Salii we may conjecture that the leaps from which the Salii took their name were supposed to promote the growth of the crops by sympathetic magic; it cannot be without significance that in their hymns these dancing priests named, and probably invoked, Saturn, the god of sowing. We may surmise that the people in the streets, and especially farmers from the country, watched their dances with eager curiosity and prognosticated the height of the corn at the next harvest from the height of their leaps into the air. In some parts of Europe, especially in Germany and Austria, it is or was till lately customary to dance or leap high for the express purpose of making the crops grow correspondingly tall ; the leaps are executed sometimes by the sower on the field, sometimes by other persons, at certain seasons, such as Candlemas and Walpurgis Night (the eve of May Day), but especially on Shrove Tuesday. Indeed in some places men used to assemble in bands for the purpose of thus fostering the growth of the crops by their leaps and antics. This was the case, for example, at Grub in the Swiss canton of the Grisons. The peasants there “assembled in some years, mostly at the time of the summer solstice, disguised themselves as maskers so as to be unrecognizable, armed themselves with weapons defensive and offensive, took every man a great club or cudgel, marched in a troop from one village to another, and executed high leaps and strange antics. They ran full tilt at each other, struck every man his fellow with all his might, so that the blow resounded, and clashed their great staves and cudgels. These foolish pranks they played from a superstitious notion, that their corn would thrive the better.” These Swiss Stopfer correspond exactly to the Roman Salii, if my view of that ancient Italian priesthood is correct.
Nemi (iii. 271).—The priest of Diana in her sacred grove (nemus) at Nemi bore the title of King of the Grove (Rex Nemorensis). He had to be a runaway slave; he succeeded to the dignity by slaying his predecessor in single combat; and he held office till he was himself slain by his successor. But before he fought the priestly king in office, a candidate for the priesthood had to break a branch from a tree in the sacred precinct, and public opinion in antiquity identified this branch with the Golden Bough, which, at the Sibyl's bidding, Aeneas plucked and carried with him as a sort of passport on his journey to the world of the dead. Once when the King of the Grove had occupied his un- enviable throne for many years, the ferocious madman Caligula sent a stronger man to attack him, professing that the king’s reign had lasted too long. The strange rule of this priestly kingdom naturally attracted the attention of the Greek writers.
This is all we know about the priesthood of Diana at Nemi. The only hope of explaining both the title and the rule seems to lie in the discovery of analogous customs elsewhere, which, being better known and more fully reported, may throw a light on the mysterious priesthood of Nemi. Now it has been the belief of peoples in many parts of the world, that kings are possessed of a divine or magical character, in virtue of which not only the welfare of their subjects, but the course of nature, including particularly the fertility of the ground, of cattle, and of women, are bound up with the life of the ruler and will suffer serious damage, or even perish, if his strength fails through illness or old age, and that the most fatal consequences would surely follow if he were allowed to die a natural death. To avert these dangers various measures are adopted. Sometimes the king’s reign is limited to a period during which he may reasonably be expected to retain his bodily and mental vigour, at the end of which he is put to death in order to avert the disasters which are expected to ensue from the failure of his natural powers. Sometimes without putting a fixed term to his reign and his life, his people allow him to reign till symptoms of old age or serious illness warn them of his threatened dissolution, which accordingly he is obliged to anticipate either by suicide or by submitting to execution. Sometimes, again, he is suffered to reign and to live so long as he can give proof of undiminished health and strength by repelling any armed attacks made upon him by candidates for the throne; but should he succumb in the combat, he is immediately succeeded in office by his slayer, who reigns in his stead until he is in his turn slain by his successor. I have suggested that the King of the Grove at Nemi was a king of this sort and held office under this last tenure, and in support of this suggestion I have adduced a number of parallels drawn from various parts of the world, particularly India and Africa. The evidence has been set forth in the Golden Bough and I need not repeat or recapitulate it here.
But here I may be allowed to cite some confirmatory evidence which has come to my knowledge since the Golden Bough was published. The custom of killing divine or semi-divine kings to prevent them from dying a natural death is particularly common in Africa. Thus in the Jukun kingdom of Kororofa, a pagan state of Northern Nigeria, “the most striking thing is the semi-divine character of the Jukun king. His person is charged with a spiritual force which makes it dangerous for anyone to be touched by him. If he even touched the ground with his hands or uncovered foot the crops would be ruined, and it was no doubt due to this blasting power of his mana that in former times the chief spoke to his subjects from behind a screen, a custom which Ibn Batuta records was also followed by the early kings of Bornu. The Jukun king is indeed a demi-god, and with a view to the transmission of his divine spirit unimpaired he was ceremonially slain at the end of seven years.” However, the king was by no means always permitted to live out the full term of seven years. “The king of the Jukun was only allowed to rule for seven years, and if during that period he fell ill, or even sneezed or coughed, or fell off his horse, he might be put to death, the duty of slaying him devolving on the head councillor.”
According to Mr. H. R. Palmer, “There was a king made every two years. When a king had reigned two years it was considered that he had enjoyed power long enough, and he was compelled to fight with the senior member of the royal family, who came forward and challenged him to fight until one of them was killed. The descent of the kingship did not go from the reigning king to one of his sons, but to any of the children of any deceased king. The would-be successor, at about the season of the great feast, used to come into the king’s mess suddenly and walk round and then go out. Of course under ordinary circumstances this would have been a great affront, but the king understood from this that from that time forward he must guard himself. At the first opportunity after this the successor attacked the king. If he killed him, the fight was over for a time; if he did not kill him, another of his relations came forward and challenged the king in the same way. This went on until someone did kill the king.”
Anna Perenna (iii. 623).—The feast of Anna Perenna was celebrated at the first milestone on the Flaminian Way. Hence the place would seem to have been near the site of the present Porta del Popolo, the northern gate of Rome, and not far from the river. Here, apparently be- tween the Flaminian and the Salarian roads, the goddess had a fruitful grove which was visible from the Janiculum. Martial, who mentions this, says that the grove “delights in virgin blood,” an obscure allusion which has hitherto not been explained. Macrobius tells us that in the month of March people went to Anna Perenna to sacrifice both publicly and privately in order that they might pass the year and many other years in prosperity; and to the same effect Joannes Lydus says that on the Ides (the 15th) of March public prayers were offered that the year might be healthy. Taken in conjunction with the custom, mentioned by Ovid (lines 531-534), of praying that the wassailers might live as many years as they had quaffed cups of wine, these statements furnish a clue to the nature of the festival and of the goddess herself. As Anna she is a feminine personification of the year (annus); as Perenna she is a personification of the endless procession of the years; hence we need not wonder that she is conceived as an old, old woman. The festival was a New Year festival; for March was the first month of the old Roman year, and the Ides of March was the first full moon of the New Year, a very appropriate day for good wishes and prayers for that and for many years to follow. The celebration of the festival, as described by Ovid, was a thoroughly popular one. The pairing of sweethearts, lying on the grass, trolling out ribald staves, and drinking themselves drunk, points to customs like those formerly observed on May Day and Midsummer Eve in many parts of Europe, when the licence accorded to the sexes was a relic of magical rites performed for the purpose of maintaining the fertility of nature alike in the greenwoods and the fields, in man and beast. In this licence we may perhaps detect the true explanation of Martial's allusions to “the virgin blood” in which the grove of the goddess delighted. It was a day of Valentines, and into the tents and leafy huts on the greensward of the grove many a girl may have gone in a maid who came out a maid no more.
Nerio (iii. 675).—This custom Ovid explains by a story of the love of Mars for Minerva. According to the tale which he now unfolds, the god fell in love with Minerva and desired to marry her. So he begged the aged Anna Perenna, now raised to the godhead, to persuade the coy goddess to crown his wishes. Anna promised her help and professed to have elicited a promise of marriage from Minerva. But this was only a sham; for when all the preparations for the wedding had been made, and the bride was conducted to the bridal chamber, the bridegroom lifted the veil to salute her, but discovered, to his chagrin, that she was not Minerva but the old crone Anna herself.
In this story Minerva has probably taken the place of Nerio, an old goddess, whom ancient Roman writers, quoted by Aulus Gellius, explicitly described as the wife of Mars. The first author cited by Gellius is Plautus, who wrote either at the end of the third century or at the beginning of the second century B.C. Plautus wrote (Truc. 515) : “Mars arriving from abroad salutes his wife Nerio.” Plautus could hardly have used this language if the belief that Nerio was the wife of Mars had not been familiar to his audience. Again, the old comic dramatist Licinius Imbrex, quoted by Aulus Gellius, wrote: “I would not have you called Neaera but Nerio, since you have been given in marriage to Mars.” Once more Aulus Gellius quotes from the third book of the Annals of his namesake Cnaeus Gellius a passage in which Neria (another form of Nerio) is plainly mentioned as the wife of Mars. Cnaeus Gellius wrote in the second century B.C. The passage in question contains a prayer to Mars supposed to have been uttered by Hersilia, the wife of Romulus, on the occasion when she was interceding with the Sabine king Tatius to pardon the Romans for having carried off the Sabine women, of whom she herself was one. The prayer runs thus: “Neria (wife) of Mars, I beseech thee, grant us peace, that we may enjoy true and happy marriages, because it fell out by the advice of thy husband that they (the Romans) should carry off us virgins, for the purpose of getting children for themselves and their people, and posterity for the fatherland.” In this prayer for marriage, appropriately addressed by a human to a divine wife, the words “thy husband” (tuus coniux) refer, of course, to Mars, as Aulus Gellius observes, adding very justly, “whereby it appears that the expression of Plautus was not a poetical flourish, but that it was a tradition that Nerio was by some said to be the wife of Mars.” It is true that Aulus Gellius himself, writing in the second century A.D., preferred to explain Nerio, not as the wife, but merely as “the force, power, majesty” of Mars; but no weight can be attached to this explanation, since it is merely an etymological guess based on a fanciful derivation of Nerio from the Greek neuron through the Latin nervus. Further, in a passage of Martianus Capella on the uxoriousness of the gods the love of Mars for his wife Nerio is mentioned in terms which agree so closely with those in which Ovid describes the passion of Mars for Minerva that both authors would seem to have drawn on the same source, in which Nerio, not Minerva, was represented as the wife of Mars. Lastly, the assumed substitution of Minerva for Nerio in the story of Mars’s wooing is confirmed by a note of the old scholiast Porphyrion on Horace, which runs thus: “There is a religious scruple about marrying in the month of May and also in March, in which a contest concerning marriage was held where in Mars was vanquished by Minerva, and having maintained her virginity she was called Neriene.” Here, as Warde Fowler observed, Neriene is clearly equivalent to Nerio, and “this looks much like an attempt to explain the occurrence of two female names, Minerva and Nerio, in the same story; the original heroine Nerio having been supplanted by the later Minerva.” Varro also coupled Minerva and Nerienes, which Aulus Gellius tells us was a vocative form of Neiio, though in the old books the nominative of the name was Nerio. Now from the work of Joannes Lydus on the Roman calendar we know that on the twenty-third of March there was a festival of Mars and Nerine, and that Nerine was no other than Nerio is put beyond a doubt by the explanation of the author, who says that Nerine was the Sabine name of a goddess whom people identified with Athena (Minerva) or Aphrodite (Venus), “for Nerine is manliness and the Sabines call manly men Nerones.” This ceremony in honour of Mars and Nerine (Nerio) on the twenty-third of March is in all probability the “contest concerning marriage” in the month of March which is mentioned by Porphyrion; and taken in conjunction with the present passage of Ovid we may conclude that it represented a marriage of Mars to Nerio, in which the god was beguiled by the substitution of a withered hag for a young and blooming bride. From a variety of indications H. Usener ingeniously argued that the marriage of Mars and Nerio was celebrated at Rome in March in the New Year, while Anna represented the old wife of the god in the Old Year which had just run its course.
Mr. Warde Fowler rejected the marriage of Mars and Nerio, together with the marriage of all the genuine old Roman gods, believing that the view of their conjugal relations was a later interpretation created by the influence of Greek mythology, in which the marriage of the deities was a commonplace. But in arriving at this conclusion he was obliged to set aside a considerable body of ancient evidence to the contrary, including the direct and explicit testimony of the greatest of Roman antiquaries, Varro himself, who, as quoted by St. Augustine, declared that “in the matter of the generations of the gods the peoples lean to the opinion of the poets rather than to that of natural philosophers; and therefore his ancestors, that is, the old Romans, believed in the sex and generations of the gods and established their marriages.” For my part I think it safer to accept than to reject the testimony of the ancients on a point concerning which they were necessarily much better informed than we are.
This incident in the loves of Mars and Minerva (or rather Nerio) strikingly resembles a wide-spread practice which is known to students of folk-lore by the name of “the False Bride.” It is a common custom among Slavonic, Teutonic, and Romance peoples, as also among the Esthonians, that when a bridegroom or his representative comes to fetch the bride from her home, a false bride is substituted for the real one, another woman, frequently an ugly old one, or a little girl, or even a man being palmed off on him as the bride. In Brittany the substitutes are first a little girl, then the mistress of the house, and lastly the grandmother. In the Samerberg district of Bavaria, a bearded man in woman's clothes personates the bride; in Esthonia, the bride's brother or some other young man. Sometimes the substitution takes place already at the betrothal, and sometimes only at the wedding-feast. The custom is not restricted to Europe. Among the Beni-Amer in North-East Africa, when women with a camel are sent to fetch the bride, her people often substitute a false bride for the true one, and it is only when the procession is well outside the village that the substitute reveals herself and runs back laughing.
The most probable explanation of the custom seems to be that it is an attempt to protect the bride against the evil eye and evil spirits by substituting a dummy on which they can safely wreak their spite. This explanation is confirmed by a custom said to be observed at a marriage in Java. A traveller in that island tells us that “among other apartments we saw the ‘family bridal chamber,’ in which we noticed two painted wooden figures, one of a man and the other of a woman, standing at the foot of the ‘family nuptial couch.’ These figures, as we were told, are called Lorobonyhoyo, or the youth and maiden, and are placed there to cheat the devil, who, according to their belief, during the wedding night hovers round the bed, with the view of carrying off one of the happy pair. These figures, however, are their protection, for, deceived by their resemblance, he carries them off instead of the sleeping lovers.” In harmony with this view the Germans of Western Bohemia, in whose marriage customs the False Bride figures prominently, believe that the “Old Bride” will always carry away the bad luck from the true bride out of the house.
The Parilia (iv. 721).—The festival of the Parilia on the 21st of April is marked PAR in the Caeretan, Maffeian, and Praenestine calendars. The name is derived from that of the divinity Pales, in whose honour the festival was celebrated. Hence the more correct, though less usual, form of the name of the festival was Palilia. Ovid treats Pales as a goddess, and so did Festus, Virgil, Tibullus, the author of the Culex, Florus, and Probus. But according to others, including Varro, Pales was male, and as a male he is noticed by Arnobius and Martianus Capella. Connected with Pales was probably the goddess Palatua, the guardian of the Palatine hill, whose worship was con- ducted by a special flamen of her own (flamen Palatualis), and must, therefore, have been of great antiquity, since none but the genuine old Roman deities could boast of the services of a flamen. At the festival of the Septimontium or the Seven Hills a sacrifice called Palatuar was offered to her. If Pales was originally a male deity, Palatua may have been his female counterpart or wife.
As Ovid relates a little further on (lines 807 sqq.), the festival of the Parilia or Palilia was believed to be older than the foundation of Rome, and it was supposed that the first foundations of the city were laid on the very day of the festival, so that the 21st of April was henceforth celebrated as the birthday of Rome. The day was naturally a popular holiday, especially for the young. Athenaeus describes how a learned discussion was suddenly interrupted by a great uproar, in which the shrill music of fifes, the clash of cymbals, and the rub-a-dub of drums were blent with singing into a confused hubbub of sound; it was the people in the street rejoicing at the coming of the Parilia, though by that time, in the third century a.d., the old name Parilia had been changed to Romaea, that is, the Roman Festival, on account of its association with the birth of Rome. It was not lawful to sacrifice any animal at the Parilia: no blood might be shed on that happy day.
Numa is said to have been born, by some divine chance, on the very day on which Rome was founded.
The festival was essentially a rustic rite observed by shepherds and husbandmen for the good of their flocks and herds. This is well brought out by Ovid in the following account which he gives of the ritual and the prayers that accompanied it; and the same truth was recognized by Varro and other ancient writers. In Eastern Europe many analogous rites have been performed down to recent times, and probably still are performed, for the same purpose, by shepherds and herdsmen on St. George’s Day, the 23rd of April, only two days after the Parilia, with which they may well be connected by descent from a common festival observed by pastoral Aryan peoples in spring. The ceremonies appear to be mainly designed to guard the flocks and herds against wolves and witches, the two great foes of whom the herds- man stands most in dread, and of the two the witches are perhaps even more dreaded than the wolves. Many peoples of Eastern Europe, including the Esthonians, Russians, and Ruthenians, drive their cattle out to pasture for the first time on St. George’s Day after their long confinement during the winter: on the eve of that day, witches resort to many tricks to steal the milk of the cattle; and many accordingly are the precautions which the herdsman takes to defeat their infernal machinations. Among these precautions are the kindling of bonfires at cross-roads, and the fumigating of the cattle with sulphur or asafoetida. Even in England it seems to have been formerly the custom to kindle bonfires on St. George's Day, as we gather from Shakespeare:
Bonfires in France I am forthwith to make
To keep our great St. George’s feast withall.
St. George is regarded as the patron of wolves as well as of cattle; hence it is naturally held that he can protect the flocks and herds against the ravages of wolves, his creatures. He has probably displaced an old pastoral deity or deities, of whom Pales may have been one. Another may possibly have been Pergrubius, to whom the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians used to sacrifice on St. George’s Day. He appears to have been a Lithuanian god of the spring, who caused the grass and the corn to grow and the trees to burst into leaf; however, nothing is said of his relation to cattle, and so far his analogy to St. George breaks down, though his festival fell on the saint’s day. In Russia St. George’s Day is celebrated as a national as well as an ecclesiastical festival; and the popular songs devoted to it serve to prove, by their mythical character, “that the Christian hero, St. George, has merely taken the place of some old deity, light-bringing or thunder-compelling, who used to be honoured at this time of the year in heathen days. It is not a slayer of dragons and protector of princesses who appears in these songs, but a patron of farmers and herdsmen, who preserves cattle from harm, and on whose day, therefore, the flocks and herds are, for the first time after the winter, sent out into the open fields.”
The October Horse (iv. 733).—Ovid means that the materials used in fumigation will be supplied by the Vestal Virgins; and of these materials he mentions three, the blood of a horse, the ashes of a calf, and bean stalks. The “ashes of a calf” are explained by the ritual observed at the Fordicidia on the 15th of April, which the poet has already described. On that day pregnant cows were sacrificed to Earth; the unborn calves were torn from them and burned by the senior Vestal Virgin, and the ashes kept by her to be used for the purification of the people at the Parilia. It is these ashes which the worshipper is now bidden to procure from Vesta, that is, from the Vestal Virgins or from the senior member of the college. The reason why the ashes of unborn calves were employed in the ritual is not hard to divine. Since a principal object of the festival, as we learn from the shepherd's prayer (lines 771-772), was to ensure the fecundity of the flock, and since sheep were fumigated (lines 739-740) as well as the shepherds, it seems plain that the smoke from ashes of the calves was supposed to fertilize, by sympathetic magic, the ewes and doubtless the cows, though curiously enough Ovid speaks only of sheep.
The blood of the horse, which was also employed in the fumigations at the Parilia, was procured in a curious fashion. On the 15th of October in every year a chariot-race was run in the Field of Mars (Campus Martius) at Rome. Stabbed with a spear, the right-hand horse of the victorious team was then sacrificed to Mars for the purpose of ensuring good crops, and its head was cut off and adorned with a string of loaves. Thereupon the inhabitants of two wards—the Sacred Way and the Subura—contended with each other who should get the head. If the people of the Sacred Way got it, it was fastened to a wall of the King's House (Regia), which stood on the Sacred Way; if the people of the Subura got it, they fastened it to the Mamilian tower, which stood in the Suburan ward and took its name from the Mamilian family. The horse's tail was cut off and carried to the King’s House with such speed that the blood dripped on the hearth of the house. This blood the King caught in a vessel and kept, or handed it over to the Vestal Virgins, whose house adjoined his own, to be burned, and fumigate by its smoke the sheep and shepherds at the Parilia. In this account the King is the Sacrificial King of republican times, though no doubt in the regal period it was the monarch himself who received the blood of the horse.
The rite was intended to procure a good crop, as indeed was explicitly stated by Festus; hence the decoration of the horse’s head with a string of loaves, and hence the use of its blood at the Parilia, where its smoke, like that from the ashes of unborn calves, was probably regarded as a fertilizing agent to get the ewes and cows with young. It is true that, in its application to the blood of a horse and the ashes of calves, the conception involved a certain confusion of the processes of animal and vegetable fertilization, but such confusion is habitual, if not universal, in ancient and primitive thought.
The question why beanstalks formed the third ingredient in the fuel kindled to make a smoke at the Parilia, is less easy to answer. In antiquity beans were the subject of such a tangle of superstitions that it is seldom or never possible to single out the separate threads and follow them up to their starting-point in the muzzy brain of primitive man.
On St. George’s Day (April 23), which is the modern equivalent of the Parilia, Southern Slavonian peasants crown their cows with wreaths of flowers to guard them against the witches; in the evening the wreaths are taken from the cows and fastened to the door of the cattle-stall, where they remain throughout the year till the next St. George’s Day.
With the offerings (line 745) and the prayer that accompanied them at the Parilia we may compare the ritual which herdsmen in the Highlands of Scotland used to observe, and the prayers which they used to utter at Beltane, the festival which is the Celtic analogue of the Italian Parilia. Thomas Pennant, who travelled in the Highlands in 1769, describes as follows the ceremony of Beltane, or Bel-tien as he calls it.
“On the first of May, the herdsmen of every village hold their Bel-tien, a rural sacrifice. They cut a square trench on the ground, leaving the turf in the middle: on that they make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal and milk; and bring besides the ingredients of the caudle, plenty of beer and whisky: for each of the company must contribute something. The rites begin with spilling some of the caudle on the ground, by way of libation: on that every one takes a cake of oatmeal, upon which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds, or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them: each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, and flinging it over his shoulders, says, ‘This I give to thee, preserve thou my horses; this is to thee, preserve thou my sheep; and so on.’ After that they use the same ceremony to the noxious animals: ‘This I give to thee, O Fox! Spare thou my lambs; this to thee, O hooded crow! This to thee, O eagle!’ When the ceremony is over, they dine on the caudle; and after the feast is finished, what is left is hid by two persons deputed for that purpose; but on the next Sunday they reassemble, and finish the reliques of the first entertainment.”
In this account of the Beltane festival the spilling of the caudle (composed partly of milk) on the ground answers to the offering of milk to Pales, and the Highland herdsman’s prayer to the being who preserved his flocks and herds corresponds to the prayer which the Italian shepherd addressed to Pales, as we learn from the following verses of Ovid. Tibullus tells us that it was his won’t to purify his shepherd every year and to sprinkle Pales with milk, referring no doubt to the libation of milk to the goddess at the Parilia. Perhaps Ovid's expression, “when the viands have been cut up,” is explained by the Beltane custom, described by Pennant, of breaking a cake of oat- meal in pieces and throwing the bits over the shoulder as offerings to the preservers or destroyers of the flocks and herds. Among the viands so cut up at the Parilia were no doubt included the millet cakes mentioned by Ovid in a previous line. These the Italian shepherd, like the Highland herdsman, may have broken and thrown over his shoulder as an offering to Pales. Certainly the cakes were an important feature of the festival; for the shepherd ends his prayer with a promise that next year he “will make great cakes for Pales, the shepherds’ mistress” (lines 775-776). The oatmeal cakes with nine knobs offered by the Highland herdsmen at Beltane remind us of the cakes with twelve knobs which the Athenians, or some of them, sacrificed in different months to Apollo and Artemis, Zeus the Farmer (Zeus Georgos), Poseidon, Cronus, Hercules, and Theios, whoever Theios may have been.
The Mundus (iv. 821).—Plutarch says that, under the direction of the wise men whom Romulus fetched from Etruria, a trench was dug round the place afterwards called the Comitium, and that first-fruits of all things which are deemed good and necessary were deposited in the trench; and finally all the people brought small portions of soil from their old habitations, threw them into the trench, and mixed them up together. This concluding part of the ceremony was doubtless a symbolical way of transferring the old homes to the new, and of ensuring union and harmony among the citizens by mingling soil brought from all the places where they had dwelt before. It is to this part of the ceremony that Ovid alludes in the words “earth fetched from the neighbouring soil.” It is said to be a Hindoo custom to bury earth from the parental homestead in the foundations of a new house. We may also compare a custom observed by the natives of the Northern territories of the Gold Coast in West Africa. “The practice of nearly every family in this country is for the headman to hold a horn containing earth from the sacred place of his ancestors, no matter how far away that is. Thus the story of the family's original home is preserved with great truth. To it sacrifices are made, and thus the Earth-god of the homeland is appeased.”
The throwing of fruits of the earth and other useful objects into the trench at the foundation of the city was, we cannot doubt, a sacrifice intended to secure the stability of the walls and the prosperity of the city, either magically by the intrinsic virtue of the things themselves, or religiously by appeasing the spirits of the earth, who were naturally disturbed by the digging of the trench. Sacrifices offered at the foundation of edifices, such as houses, bridges, and city gates, have been exceedingly common all over the world; the victims sacrificed have often been human beings. The sacrifices offered by the Romans at the laying of foundations would seem to have been bloodless.
It is to be remembered that the digging of the trench, here described by Ovid, was supposed (as the poet has just reminded us) to have taken place at the festival of the Parilia, which, as we have seen, has some points of analogy with Beltane, the festival formerly held by Scottish herdsmen on May Day. It will be remembered that a feature of the Beltane celebration was the cutting of a square or round trench, in which the herdsmen sacrificed, prayed, and partook of a sacrificial meal. This trench seems to form another link between the Parilia and Beltane. Now the original trench dug at the foundation of the city, on the day of the Parilia appears to have been square, being in fact identical with what was called Square Rome (Quadrata Roma), which, as described by Festus, was a place “in front of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, where are laid up the things which are wont to be employed for the sake of a good omen at the founding of a city it is so called because it was originally fortified with a stone wall in a square form.” The description answers well to that which Ovid and Plutarch give of the trench dug by Romulus at the foundation of Rome to receive the foundation sacrifices, except that Plutarch describes the trench as carried in a circle round the Comitium but Plutarch was certainly wrong as to the situation of the trench, and he may have been equally wrong as to its shape.
Perhaps we can explain Plutarch’s mistake in regard to the shape. For he tells us that the trench was called the mundus or sky (Olympus is the word he uses to translate the Latin mundus), and that the furrow marking out the boundary of the new city was traced in a circle round the mundus, as centre. Yet in another passage Plutarch mentions Square Rome, but applies the name in a wider sense to the whole city founded by Romulus, and it was apparently in this wider sense that the term Square-Rome was generally employed, as by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Solinus, who says that the city founded by Romulus “was first called Square Rome because it was laid out in a quadrangle. It begins at the wood which is in Apollo’s area, and it ends on the brow of the hill at the staircase of Cacus, where was the hut of Faustulus. Romulus dwelt there.” Yet the use of the name Square Rome to designate a particular place on the Palatine persisted down to the year A.D. 204 at the least. We may perhaps reconcile the testimonies of Festus and Plutarch on this point by supposing that Square Rome was a square subterranean chamber supposed to represent the trench dug by Romulus at the foundation of the city, while the mundus was a circular aperture in the middle of the floor, which gave access to a lower vault or crypt, and down which the offerings could be cast into the vault. This accords well with a statement of Festus, quoting Ateius Capito, that the mundus was opened only on three days in the year, namely, on the day after the festival of Vulcan (which fell on the 23rd of August), and again on the 5th of October and the 8th of November. The reason for keeping the mundus closed all the rest of the year, according to Festus, or rather his authority, Ateius Capito, was that the lower part of the structure (what I have called the vault or crypt) was sacred to the deified spirits of the dead (di manes), who would naturally be able to issue forth and roam about the city if the aperture were uncovered. Hence the three days on which the mundus stood open, and hell was let loose, were “religious” days: no public business might be transacted on them, and no battle fought with an enemy.
In 1914 Giacomo Boni discovered on the Palatine a subterranean structure which he identified with the mundus, and the identification appears to be generally regarded as at least probable. The structure is situated under the north-eastern portion of the peristyle of the Flavian palace, and consists of “a chamber with a beehive roof, the sides of which are lined with cappellaccio (the soft dark tufa used in the earliest buildings of Rome); in the centre of it a circular shaft descends to two underground passages lined with cement: these diverge, but meet again in another chamber with a domed roof (cut in the rock), of which only half is preserved, the rest having been destroyed by Domitian's foundations.”
From Mr. Ashby’s account it appears that the discoverer, Boni, identified the upper chamber with the mundus. But perhaps we should rather identify the upper chamber with Square Rome and the circular shaft with the mundus; the lower chamber, to which the shaft gives access, would then be the abode of the dead, and we should have to suppose that the hatches were battened down on the ghosts by keeping the mouth of the shaft closed throughout the year, except on the three days when the hatches were unbarred and the unquiet spirits were let loose to squeak and gibber about the streets.
W. Warde Fowler propounded a theory that the mundus was a receptacle in which the corn-seed was stowed at harvest, and from which it was brought out for the sowing, but in support of this view, which has no ancient authority, he adduced only somewhat vague analogies. On the other hand he may well have been right in his assumption (equally destitute, however, of ancient authority), that the mundus was closed by the stone called lapis manalis, which may mean “the ghost stone” that the stone “was esteemed the Gate of Hell (Ostium Orci) through which the souls of the underground folk, who are called ghosts (manes), pass to the folk above.” Such a stone would be admirably fitted to bottle up the ghosts at the bottom of the mundus by inserting it, like a stopper, in the mouth of the shaft.
Robigalia (iv. 907).—The festival of the Robigalia in honour of the god or goddess Mildew (Robigus or Robigo), for there was some difference of opinion as to the sex of the deity, is recorded under the twenty-fifth of April in the Esquiline, Caeretan, Maffeian, and Praenestine calendars; and the date of the festival is further confirmed by the testimony of Festus, Pliny, and Servius. A note in the Praenestine calendar, probably indited by Verrius Flaccus, gives some additional information: “The festival of Robigiis takes place at the fifth milestone on the Claudian Way, lest mildew (robigo) should harm the corn. A sacrifice is offered and games are held by runners both men and boys.” According to Pliny, the festival was instituted by Numa in the eleventh year of his reign, and the reason for holding it on the twenty-fifth of April was because at that season the crops were attacked by mildew. That Mildew, whether you call him Robigus or her Robigo, was a deity, and that he or she could protect the crops against the mildew from which he or she took his or her name, of that no reasonable man appears to have entertained a doubt. “The Robigalia,” says the grave Varro, “is named after Robigus; while the crops are in the field sacrifices are offered to this god, lest mildew should attack the crops.” To the same effect Festus, or rather his late epitomizer Paulus, says that “the Robigalia is a festival on the twenty-fifth day of April, on which they sacrificed to their god Robigus, who, they thought, could ward off mildew.” The only question that could fairly be asked was whether the deity was male or female, a god (Robigus) or a goddess (Robigo). Ovid makes a goddess of Mildew (Robigo), and in this he is supported by Columella, and followed by the Christian Fathers Tertullian, Lactantius, and Augustine. But the weight of ancient authority is in favour of the view that Mildew was really a god (Robigus) rather than a goddess (Robigo); so at least thought, or reported, Varro, Verrius Flaccus, Festus, Aulus Gellius, and Servius.
We learn from Ovid that the victims sacrificed to Mildew (Robigus or Robigo) at the Robigalia were a dog and a sheep (lines 908, 935-936). Columella describes the canine victim more exactly as a sucking puppy, whose blood and bowels served to propitiate the malignant goddess Mildew (Robigo), in order that she might not blight the green crops.
But the god or goddess Mildew was not by any means the only enemy with whom the crops had to wrestle, and whose favour was sought by the sacrifice of a dog. Another formidable foe of the farmer was Sirius or the Dog-star, and what could be more natural than to appease the wrath of the Dog-star by the sacrifice of a dog? And this in fact was done. Every year a sacrifice, called the Doggy Sacrifice (sacrum canarium), was offered at Rome by the Eublic priests, because at the rising of the Dog-star the heat of the summer was most intense and sickness was rife. However, it would seem that the sacrifice was not offered at the moment of the rising of the Dog-star, which, as we have seen, took place on the second of August; for in the books of the pontiffs it was laid down as a rule that the days for taking the omens from dogs (augurio canario agendo), which presumably coincided with the days on which the dogs were sacrificed, “should be fixed before the corn has sprouted from the sheath, but not before it is in the sheath.” This points to a day in spring, and certainly not in the torrid heat of an Italian August. If, as Warde Fowler says, this stage in the growth of the corn takes place in Italy at the end of April or the beginning of May, the Doggy Sacrifice must have been offered about the same time as the Robigalia, but it need not have coincided with it, except by accident; for whereas the Doggy Sacrifice was clearly a movable feast, the date of which was determined by the pontiffs from year to year according to the state of the crops, the Robigalia was always nailed down to the twenty-fifth of April. The Doggy Sacrifice was offered not far from a gate at Rome which was called in consequence the Puppy’s Gate (Porta Catularia), because there “red bitches were sacrificed to appease the Dog-star, which is hostile to the corn, in order that the yellowing corn may reach maturity.”
The situation of the Puppy’s Gate at Rome is otherwise unknown; it appears to be mentioned by no other ancient writer. The same may be said of the grove of Mildew mentioned by Ovid, where he saw the rites of the Robigalia performed.
The Good Goddess (v. 148).—The nature of the Good Goddess appears to have been a matter of some uncertainty both in ancient and modern times. Cornelius Labeo regarded her as an Earth-goddess, identical with Maia, Fauna, Ops, and Fatua; he affirmed that her character as an Earth-goddess was proved by the secret rites observed in her honour, and that she was invoked in the books of the pontiffs under the titles Good, Fauna, Ops, and Fatua. On the whole, this view of the Good Goddess as an Earth-goddess, invoked by women for the sake of procuring offspring and ensuring the fertility of the ground, has been adopted by modern writers on Roman religion. Her identification with the old Roman goddess Maia, who gave her name to the month of May, may have arisen from the accident that both were worshipped on MayDay. According to Festus, the Good Goddess was also called Damia, her priestess bore the title of Damiatrix, and a secret sacrifice in her honour was known as Damium. This points to an identification or confusion of the Good Goddess with the Greek goddess Damia, a divinity of growth and fertility akin to Demeter. The affinity of the Good Goddess to Demeter comes out in other ways. The victim offered to the Good Goddess was a sow, and tame serpents seem to have been kept in her temple. Similarly, pigs were the victims regularly offered to Demeter, and in her sacred vaults or chasms there were serpents which consumed the pigs thrown into them at the women’s festival of the Thesmophoria. Once a year the Roman women celebrated by night secret rites m honour of the Good Goddess; the celebration took place in the house of the consul or praetor for the year, and all men had to quit the house for the occasion, because no male might be present at the rites; the Vestal Virgins assisted at the ceremony. In the year 62 B.C., while the women were celebrating these mysteries in the house of Julius Caesar, who was then praetor, the notorious profligate Publiua Clodius made his way into their midst disguised as a lute-girl, but he was discovered and ejected. The affair created a great scandal, and Caesar in consequence divorced his wife Pompeia, with whom Clodius was in love.
Lemuria (v. 421).—The Lemures were the wandering spirits of the dead, conceived especially as mischievous and dangerous to the living. In this sense, the word seems nearly equivalent to larvae, whereas manes is so far distinct that it seems generally to signify the benevolent and worshipful spirits of the dead. The ghosts who visited the houses on the three days of the festival (see 491-2) were the spirits of kinsfolk departed this life (443). From this it appears that the three days of the Lemuria were All Souls’ Days, on which the spirits of the dead were supposed to revisit their old homes: they were received with a mixture of reverence and fear, and after they had picked up the black beans thrown to them, they were politely, but firmly, turned out of doors. The ghosts were supposed to accept the beans as a substitute for the living members of the family, whom otherwise they would have carried off, being either envious of the living or feeling lonesome in the other world. The Romans threw beans into graves “for the safety of men,” probably in the hope that the dead would accept the offering and leave the living alone. The reason which induced ghosts to accept beans as substitutes is not manifest, but beans were supposed to belong in a special way to the dead, and for that reason the Flamen Dialis might not touch or name them, much less might he eat them: his sanctity would have been profaned by any contact, direct or indirect, with the dead.
In many parts of the world it is a common notion that he spirits of the dead revisit the living on one day or on several days of the year; they return in particular to their old homes, and are received with respect by their kinsfolk, who after entertaining them hospitably, dismiss them more or less forcibly to the Land of the Dead, where it is hoped they will remain peaceably till the same time next year. They are believed to be very touchy, and capable, if offended, of afflicting the living with all kinds of misfortune. The use of beans finds a curious parallel in the use of beans at the expulsion of demons in Japan. The head of the family, clad in his finest robes, goes through all the rooms at midnight, carrying a box of roasted beans. From time to time he scatters a handful on a mat, pronouncing a form of words which means “Go forth demons! enter riches!”
The Argei (v. 621).—Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i. 38. 3) says, that down to his own time, on the Ides of May, “after offering the preliminary sacrifices according to the laws, the Pontiffs, and with them the Virgins who guard the eternal fire, and the praetors, and all the citizens who may lawfully attend the rites, fling effigies made in human form, thirty in number, from the sacred bridge into the stream of the Tiber, and the effigies they call Argei.” Varro: “The Argei are twenty-seven effigies of men made of rushes…” The name Argei or Argea was also applied to a number of chapels distributed over the four regions of Rome: twenty-seven, if we accept a probable emendation of Varro’s text. The number twenty-seven (thrice nine) had a mystic significance in Greek or Roman ritual. A procession went to the twenty-seven chapels on March 16 and 17 (iii. 791); it is a plausible conjecture that on these days the puppets were carried to the chapels, and left there till May 14 or 15, when they were brought forth, carried again in solemn procession through the streets to the Sublician Bridge, and cast by the Vestals into the Tiber. With regard to the origin and signification of the custom, the ancients seem to have been as much in the dark as we are. Some believed the rite to have been a substitute for human sacrifices. Another theory was that in ancient times men over sixty years of age used to be thrown from the bridge into the river; and in support of this view the proverb Sexagenarios de ponte was quoted. So rooted in the Roman mind was the association of sexagenarians with a bridge and a watery death, that an appropriate word was coined to describe them, Depontani!—W. Mannhardt proposed to regard the puppets as representing the dying spirit of vegetation in the spring, who at the beginning of summer was carried out to burial and thrown into the river, in order that revived by the water, he might return in fresh vigour next year, to animate the crops and other fruits of the earth. This ingenious theory he supported by many parallel customs of modern European peasants, in which the outworn spirit of Vegetation is certainly thus represented by puppets thrown into water. But he admitted that the date was not a very suitable one for the death and burial of the Spirit of Vegetation, who at that season might rather be thought to be in the very flower of his age. To meet this objection, he was driven to conjecture that the custom may originally have been celebrated in the height of summer, perhaps on Midsummer Day; the shift of date he thought may have occurred under the old unreformed calendar, when the times were out of joint. But this is a mere conjecture, unsupported by evidence. The theory is open to other objections; and so far as I can see, there is little or nothing to suggest that the ceremony had anything to do with vegetation. The puppets were made of rushes; the case would have been different if they had been made of cornstalks. There was little in the Vestals and Pontiffs to connect them with the Spirit of Vegetation. The old bridge over the Tiber is hardly a place where we should expect to meet the Spirit of Vegetation. On the whole then, I find no sufficient reason for regarding the ceremony as a fertility rite.
But the description of Plutarch, “the greatest of purifications” (Q. Rom. 86), suggests an interpretation which can be supported by world-wide analogies. In many parts of the world it has been customary to set apart a day or several days every year for the public expulsion of all the evils which are supposed to have accumulated in the country and the town during the past year. Often these evils are personified as demons or ghosts; where the people dwell beside a river or sea, the demons are often sent away in boats which are allowed to drift down stream or out to sea. Sometimes they are supposed to be embodied in effigies, which are cast out with great ceremony. Here I will quote only a single example.
“At Old Calabar, on the coast of Guinea, the devils and ghosts are, or used to be, publicly expelled once in two years. Among the spirits thus driven from their haunts are the souls of all the people who have died since the last lustration of the town. About three weeks or a month before the expulsion, which, according to one account, takes place in the month of November, rude effigies representing men and animals, such as crocodiles, leopards, elephants, bullocks and birds, are made of wicker-work or wood, and being hung with strips of cloth and bedizened with gewgaws, are set before the door of every house. About three o’clock in the morning of the day appointed for the ceremony the whole population turns out into the streets, and proceeds with a deafening uproar and in a state of the wildest excitement to drive all lurking devils and ghosts into the effigies, in order that they may be banished with them from the abodes of men. For this purpose bands of people roam through the streets knocking on doors, firing guns, beating drums, blowing on horns, ringing bells, clattering pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might and main; in short, making all the noise it is possible for them to raise. The hubbub goes on till the approach of dawn, when it gradually subsides and ceases altogether at sunrise. By this time the houses have been thoroughly swept, and all the frightened spirits are supposed to have huddled into the effigies or their fluttering drapery. In these wicker figures are also deposited the sweepings of the houses and the ashes of yesterday’s fires. Then the demon-laden images are hastily snatched up, and carried in tumultuous procession down to the brink of the river, and thrown into the water to the tuck of drums. The ebb-tide bears them away seaward, and thus the town is swept clean of ghosts and devils for another two years.”
Now if we could assume that the Argei represented the accumulated demons of the whole year, the resemblance between the Roman and African customs would be close, and Plutarch would be justified in describing the ceremony as “the greatest of purifications.” The three days of the Lemuria ended on May 13, that is, on the very day before the Argei were thrown into the water. The immediate sequence suggests that while the Lemuria was the private expulsion of ghosts, the ceremony of the Argei was the public expulsion of the same uncanny visitors on the following day.
But there is another and simpler explanation of the Argei which deserves to be considered. May they not have been offerings to the River-god, to pacify him, and to induce him to put up with the indignity of having a bridge built across his stream? There is much to be said for this explanation, which I suggested many years ago, and which I still incline to think the most probable. We can easily imagine the indignation which a river-god must feel at the sight of a bridge, and of people passing dry-shod across it, who in the course of nature would have been drowned at the ford. Thus the deity is robbed of his prey; and he naturally puts in a claim for compensation. That claim the Romans may have attempted to satisfy by throwing, once a year, the puppets in human shape from the offending bridge, one puppet for every ward in the city, trusting that the river-god would graciously accept them instead of live men and women, and that thus contented, he would not rise in flood, and come in person to snatch his prey from the streets and houses of Rome. On this hypothesis, nothing could be more fitting than that the offering should be under the auspices of the pontiffs, whose very name, signifying “bridge-makers,” marked them out as the culprits responsible for the sacrilege, and therefore as the penitents bound to atone for it. The bridge which the pontiffs are traditionally said to have built was the very same Sublician Bridge from which the puppets were thrown ; the tradition of the construction was presumed in the song of the Salii, one of the oldest documents of the Latin language. The bridge was the first ever built at Rome; its custody and maintenance were committed to the pontiffs, who had to perform certain solemn rites and sacrifices whenever it stood in need of repairs.
The belief that the spirit of a river demands a sacrifice of one or more human victims each year persists in some parts of Europe till this day. Similar conceptions meet us in many parts of the world; to this day, or down at all events to recent times, bridges have been the object of superstitious fear, not only in Africa and India, but even in the more backward parts of Europe.
Semo Sancus (vi. 213).—The worship of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius was cared for by a special company of priests, who bore the title of Bidental; and as bidental was the name given to a place struck by lightning, at which an expiatory sacrifice of two-year-old sheep (bidentes) had been offered, we may infer that the Bidental priests were charged with the duty of offering such sacrifices. Semo is apparently the singular form of a noun which occurs in the plural form Semunis in the song of the Salii. The statue of Semo Sancus, which Justin Martyr and Tertuliian took for that of Simon the Magician, has been found at Rome, with the inscription which Tertuliian, or his informant, misread: Sanco sancto Semon. deo [sic, for Dio] Fidio sacrum decuria sacerdotum hidentalium. Thus to make sure that the god received his full title, the priests called him sanctus as well as sancus. It was natural that he should be invoked in oaths or asseverations to attest the truth of the statement: Me Dius Fidius or Medius Fidius. It was a rule of domestic ritual, that he who would swear by Dius Fidius should go out into the compluvium, the unroofed place in the middle of the house, where he could swear under the open sky; and the god’s temple had a hole in the roof through which the sky could be seen. If Dius Fidius was a sky-god who wielded the lightning, it was very natural that those who took his name on their lips should do so in the open air, where the deity could see them and smite them to the ground with his thunderbolt if they took his name in vain. On the bronze tablets discovered at Gubbio (Iguvium) there is mention of a god Fisos Sansios or Fisouis Sansios, who was probably no other than Fidius Sancus in a dialectically different form. Dius is probably connected with the nouns Djovis and Jupiter: in other words, the people originally swore by the Sky-god under the special title of Fidius, as the guardian of good faith: but in time they came to look upon him as a distinct deity. Thus we seem bound to recognize a process of multiplying gods, by creating special gods for the discharge of special functions, which had previously been performed by a single god of all work. No people, perhaps, carried this principle further than the Romans; and if only they had had time to apply it consistently to their chief god Jupiter, they might have ended by stripping him of his multifarious duties, and entrusting them to a number of deputy-deities, who, we cannot doubt, would have discharged them quite as efficiently. Thus, gradually retiring from the active control of affairs in this sublunary sphere, Jupiter might at last have become little more than a sleeping partner in a divine firm, whose august name might still be read on the golden plate of the celestial door, and whose existence everyone acknowledged in theory, though nobody troubled about him in practice. To this state of dignified and somnolent repose the great Sky-god has in fact been reduced almost all over Africa at the present day.
The worship of Vesta (vi. 257).—There seems every reason to believe that the worship of Vesta, in other words, the institution of a Common Hearth Avith a sacred and perpetual fire burning on it, was very much older than the oldest of her temples inRome. When we compare Vesta with the Greek Hestia, whose very name, etymologically linked with Vesta, means simply “Hearth,” and who like Vesta was worshipped in the Prytaneum, that is, in the Prince’s house, where a perpetual fire burned on the hearth, we can hardly doubt that the institution dates from a remote prehistoric period when the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans dwelt together and worshipped the fire which burned on the hearth of the King’s house. For the temple of Vesta was situated beside the Regia or King’s house, and was never a temple in the strict sense of the word, for it had never been consecrated by the augurs. So in Greecethe Common Hearth appears never to have been placed in a temple, but regularly in a prytaneum, that is the house of the prytanis or prince. The maintenance of a perpetual fire in it was probably at first a matter rather of practical convenience than of religious ritual. When a fire has to be laboriously kindled by rubbing two sticks against each other, it is very convenient to keep a fire constantly burning. That this mode of kindling fire by the friction of wood was formerly in vogue amongst the Romans, we know from the rule, that whenever the Vestal fire was accidentally extinguished, the Vestal Virgins were whipped by the Pontifex Maximus, and compelled to rub a board of lucky wood with a borer till it took fire. We may further suppose that the Vestal Virgins represented the King’s unmarried daughters, who may have been charged with the duties of keeping the fire always alight on the hearth, fetching water, grinding corn, and baking cakes, to be eaten by the family as well as to be offered to the Goddess of the Hearth.
The Pontifex Maximus seems to have possessed paternal power over them, and he appears in certain respects to have succeeded to the place and functions of the old King, though in other respects these were inherited by the Rex Sacrificulus.
Among the Damaras or Hereros of S.W. Africa the sacred fire, which is kept constantly burning, is regularly tended by the King's eldest unmarried daughter. The round shape of the temple of Vesta is explained most naturally as the ancient form of house which the Italians are known to have inhabited in prehistoric ages. The prehistoric villages disinterred in North Italy show these round huts, which appear to have been constructed of wattle and daub, or branches. In the cemetery of Alba Longa, the ashes are deposited in urns which obviously represent round huts, constructed of clay, brushwood, or other perishable stuff. At Rome itself funeral urns of the same type were found. In view of all this evidence it is reasonable to assume that the first temple of Vesta at Rome was a round hut of the same sort. Two such huts were sedulously preserved at Rome itself. One of these was the hut of Romulus on the Palatine (iii. 183) ; the other was the hut of Faustulus, preserved in the temple of Jupiter (Mythographi Graeci, p. 149).
Vacuna (vi. 307).—Writing from his home in the Sabine hills an immortal letter, instinct with love of the country, to a city friend who did not share his rural tastes, Horace concludes by saying that he had dictated the letter “behind Vacuna’s mouldering fane.” On this passage his old scholiast Porphyrion remarks that Vacuna was a Sabine goddess of uncertain form and nature; some thought that she was Bellona, others Minerva, and others Diana. In the first book of his lost work, The Antiquities of Divine Things, Varro identified her with Victory. The statement that she was a Sabine goddess is confirmed by several inscriptions found in the Sabine country, for they contain dedications to her. One of them, found near Reate, records the vow of two persons to Vacuna for the return of a certain L. Acestus from Africa. Another, also found near Reate, records the vow of a certain Esuvius Modestus for the health of his father. The latter vow suggests that Vacuna was a medical goddess, endowed with healing power.
Now we know from Pliny that Vacuna had a grove in the Sabine country near to the river Avens (the modern Velino) and to Reate, and that in the territory of Reate there was a lake called the lake of Cutilia or Cutiliae, which Varro regarded as the navel or central point of Italy, and in which there was a wood and a floating island. Seneca tells us that he had seen the island, and that though it was clothed with grass and trees, it never remained stationary, but floated hither and thither with every breath of wind. This property he attributed in part to the weight of the water, which he describes as medicated. The lake of Cutilia, with its moving island, is mentioned by Varro, and is described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Macrobius, who confirm Seneca’s account of the floating island, except that according to Dionysius only grass and some inconsiderable bushes grew on it, and the island stood not more than a foot above the level of the lake. Dionysius tells us further that the natives regarded the lake as bottomless and as sacred to Victory (Nike), and that in consequence they surrounded the water with fillets and allowed nobody to approach it except at certain times of the year, when religious rites were performed. At these times sacrifices were offered on the floating island by persons who might lawfully do so. Now since in this part of his work, which describes the first settlement of the aborigines in the heart of Italy, Dionysius is professedly following the Antiquities of Varro, it becomes highly probable that the goddess of the lake, whom Dionysius calls Victory, was no other than Vacuna, whom Varro, as we saw, identified with Victory.
Strabo informs us that the water of Cutilia was cold, and that people drank it and sat in it for the healing of disease. He does not indeed mention the lake but only the waters at Cutiliae (Cutilia), which was a town on a hill near the lake. This water at Cutilia in the Sabine country is described by Pliny as so excessively cold that it almost seemed to bite the drinker, yet as extremely salubrious for the stomach, the sinews, and indeed the whole body further he says that it was of a nitrous quality and purgative in its effect. The same statement had previously been made by Vitruvius, from whom Pliny may have borrowed it. Celsius recommended standing “in cold medical springs like those at Cutiliae” as a remedy for looseness of the bowels.
The purgative effect of the water of Cutilia was experienced with fatal results by the Emperor Vespasian. Being a native of the Sabine country, for he was born at a small village near Reate, it was his habit to pass the hot months of the Italian summer among his native mountains at Cutilia and in the country about Reate. In the last year of his life (A.D. 79), being troubled with a slight indisposition in Campania, he returned in haste to Rome, and from there rode or was carried up to the scenes of his youth at Cutilia and the neighbourhood. There, as a remedy for the sickness which increased upon him, he took frequent draughts of the ice-cold water, and though they had no effect in abating his malady, he continued to discharge his imperial duties lying in bed, where he gave audience to embassies. But at last he was seized with a fit of diarrhoea so violent that he almost swooned. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he said, “An emperor should die standing.” So saying, he struggled to his feet and, with the support of his attendants, died standing like an emperor and a soldier.
The Emperor was not the only victim of the cold water cure, which had been made fashionable by Antonius Musa, physician to Augustus. Having recalled his imperial master from the gates of death by cold baths and copious draughts of cold water in the style of Doctor Sagrando, the Roman doctor blossomed out into fame: the Emperor rewarded him liberally: the Senate showered money and honours on him: his admirers subscribed for a portrait-statue of the good physician, which was set up beside that of his divine prototype Aesculapius. Cold water now became the rage and the last word in medical science. The fashionable doctor compelled poor Horace, shivering and shuddering, to submit to cold douches in the depth of winter, when he longed for the sunshine and the myrtle-groves of Baiae. But Musa tried his nostrum once too often when he applied it to the youthful Marcellus, the hope of Rome and perhaps the destined heir of the empire; for the young man succumbed to the cure.
On the whole it appears that for a time the cold medicinal springs of Cutilia in the Sabine hills were resorted to by the sick, who both drank the water and bathed in it for the sake of their health. Perhaps, on the days when sacrifices were offered to the goddess on the island, and the holy lake was opened to the public, the patients were allowed to plunge into its healing water, like the impotent folk at the pool of Bethesda; and as the curative property of the pool at Jerusalem was ascribed to an angel who went down at a certain season into the pool and troubled the water, so we may suppose that at Cutilia the sick who survived the cold plunge attributed their deliverance to the divine Lady of the Lake, the goddess Vacuna. From Ovid we learn that, when sacrifices were offered to Vacuna, people stood and sat in front of her sacred hearth. If the present view of Vacuna is correct, we may suppose that these worshippers were the visitors to the Spa who had benefited by the waters, and who testified their gratitude to the goddess for their cure by joining in a thanksgiving service. And when we remember the purgative effect of the water, and the melancholy fate of Vespasian, we shall perhaps not go far astray if we conjecture that the name and the function of Vacuna, the goddess of the water, had reference ad evacuandum alvum. In that case we need not wonder that Horace, who had suffered from her, allowed her shrine at the back of his house in the country to fall into decay. Yet long after the poet’s ashes had been laid beside those of his friend Maecenas on the Esquiline, the Emperor Vespasian, who had even less reason than Horace to be grateful to Vacuna, appears to have repaired the ruined shrine; for in the valley of the Digentia, which flowed through or near Horace's farm, and at the village of Rocca Giovine, there was found an inscription recording that the Emperor Vespasian had restored at his own expense the temple of Victory, which had fallen into ruin through long lapse of time. When we bear in mind that Vacuna was identified with Victory by Varro, we need not hesitate to believe that this ruined temple of Victory was no other than “the mouldering fane of Vacun” mentioned by Horace. In after ages, when the memory of Vacuna and her drastic water had faded from the minds even of the learned, the poet Ausonius used her name as a synonym for leisure, evidently deriving her name from vacare in the sense of “to be at leisure.”
Cloaca (vi. 401).—The low ground in the centre of Rome, surrounded by hills from which the water runs down into it, must have been very swampy in the old days before it was drained by the wonderful system of stone sewers, which dates from the regal period and has survived in part to the present time. Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us that when the Sabine king Tatius first occupied the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, the valley at the foot of the Capitol was occupied partly by a wood and partly by a lake formed by the streams which poured down from the surrounding hills. The king cut down the wood and filled up a great part of the lake, and so formed the Roman Forum, which was probably in origin rather a market than a place of public assembly, like the Cattle Market (Forum Boarium or Bovarium), the Vegetable Market (Forum Holitorium), the Fish Market (Forum Piscarium), and so forth. Varro speaks of “the marshy place which was then in the Forum before the sewers were made.” Even when Rome had risen to the height of her glory as mistress of the world, the extent and solidity of these vast drainage works, testifying to the engineering skill and enterprise of earlier ages, excited the wonder and admiration of Greeks and Romans alike.
The existing remains of the ancient Roman sewers are of various dates and various styles. The sewers of Republican or regal date are built of squared blocks of tufa or peperino: the oldest of them are roofed over with triangular tops formed of courses of stones on level beds, each course projecting over the one below. This archaic mode of construction, which probably preceded the invention of the arch, is exemplified in the great beehive tombs of prehistoric Greece, and at Rome the lowest dungeon of the Mamertine prison, known as the Tullianum, where the Catalinarian conspirators were strangled, is built in the same primitive style of masonry and in the same circular shape. But most, apparently, of the Republican or regal sewers are roofed with regular arches of solid masonry. Under the Empire great sewers were formed of concrete faced with bricks and covered with semicircular vaults also of concrete. Smaller drains were commonly roofed with large tiles set leaning together in a triangular form. The Great Sewer (Cloaca Maxima) starts in the valley of the Subura, at the foot of the Carinae, the elevated spur of the Esquiline, on which now stand the churches of S. Pietro in Vincoli and S. Francesco di Paolo. It then crosses the Forum, passing under the south end of the Basilica Julia. Thence it runs under the ancient Tuscan street (vicus Tuscus) and the valley of the Velabrum, till it reaches the Tiber near the little round temple in the Forum Boarium. In 1890 a piece of the sewer more than 200 yards long was cleared out between the Forum of Augustus and the Roman Forum. It is here built of massive blocks of peperino (lapis Gabinus); it is 10 feet 6 inches wide, and about 14 feet high to the crown of the vault. Its floor is paved with polygonal blocks of lava, like a Roman street. At its exit on the Tiber the arch of the sewer is nearly 11 feet wide and more than 12 feet high, and is formed of three rings of peperino blocks. A considerable piece of this great sewer is now to be seen near the church of S. Giorgio in Velabro. The larger part of this section belongs to the Republican period, but some of the restorations are of later date.
As the original construction of these great arched sewers was unanimously referred by the Romans to their two Etruscan kings, the Tarquins, it is natural to suppose that the use of the arch in architecture was borrowed by the Romans from Etruria. Indeed, some good modern scholars have held that the invention of the true arch, built of wedge-shaped blocks of stone (voussoirs) fitted together in a segment of a circle, must be attributed to the Etruscans, who in that case proved themselves the masters both of the Greeks and the Romans in this important branch of architecture. The Etruscan origin of the great Roman sewers is confirmed by the existence of an exactly similar sewer built of stone at the Etruscan city of Graviscae, by the sea near Tarquinii. It is 14 feet wide, and ends, like the Great Sewer at Rome, in a massive quay wall some 20 feet high. Other ancient sewers of the same sort exist in Etruria. In recent years the excavations conducted by Mr. Woolley for the British Museum at Ur of the Chaldees have proved that the principle of the arch was familiar to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia at a time which long preceded, not only the foundation of Rome, but the settlement of the Etruscans in Italy. Hence it is probable that the Etruscans brought the knowledge of the arch with them from their old home in Asia, where they may have borrowed it, directly or indirectly, from Babylonia.
Vertumnus or Vortumnus (vi. 409).—Some Roman antiquaries looked on Vortumnus as an Etruscan deity. Varro even affirmed that Vortumnus was the chief god of Etruria, and that at Rome his image was set up in the Tuscan Street on account of his Tuscan origin. Similarly Propertius represents the god as declaring in so many words that he was an Etruscan and came from Etruria, having deserted the Etruscan city of Volsinii during the wars. But we know that there was a temple of Vortumnus on the Aventine, which appears to have been dedicated on the 13th of August, and the temple contained a picture of M. Fulvius Flaccus in his triumphal robes. Since M, Fulvius Flaccus was consul in 264 B.C. and celebrated a triumph in the same year for his victory over the Volsinians, we may suppose with some degree of probability that the temple was erected by the victorious general, not only to commemorate his success, but also to secure the divine favour by transferring the chief god of the conquered foe from Volsinii to Rome. Now in the days of the independence of Etruria, the federal council of the league regularly met at the shrine of a goddess named Voltumna, where measures of war and peace were concerted. This shrine of Voltumna appears to have been at or near Volsinii, for down to the time of Constantine an annual assembly was held at Volsinii, accompanied by the celebration of theatrical performances and gladiatorial combats. This suggests that the goddess Voltumna was the wife, or, at all events, the female counterpart, of Vortumnus, and that the pair were the patron deities of Volsinii, from which they took their name and to which they stood in much the same relation in which Athena stood to Athens. If that was so, the proper form of the god's name would seem to have been Voltumnus rather than Vortumnus.
If Vortumnus was indeed an Etruscan deity in name and origin, the similarity of his name, especially in the form Vertumnus, to Latin is deceptive, and the account which the Roman poets gave of his power of shape-shifting must be dismissed as based on nothing better than the false etymology which would explain the name Vertumnus as equivalent to Turner, from vertere, “to turn.” We have seen that Propertius and Ovid proposed to derive the god's name from his exploit in turning back the flooded Tiber. But no sooner has he suggested this explanation than Propertius propounds another. Perhaps, says he, speaking in the god’s name, “I am called Vertumnus because I receive the fruit of the turning year” (annus vertens). For it seems that the first fruits of the season were offered to Vertumnus. In the right hand of his image, or perhaps rather in a basket which he held out to his worshippers, might be seen the first purple grapes of the vintage, the first yellow ears of corn at harvest, sweet blushing cherries, autumn plums, apples and pears, and mulberries reddening in summer days; there, too, in the basket lay the dark-green cucumber and swelling gourd, and there, or wreathed about his face, drooped every flower that bloomed in the meadows. This fancy Ovid took up and told, in charming verses worthy of Herrick, how Vertumnus, the god of the turning year, wooed and won the love of Pomona, the goddess of fruit, who dwelt demure in her loved orchard, barred against the wanton crew of amorous rural deities, till Vertumnus found his way into her heart. But the goddess was coy, and the god justified his name by turning into many shapes before she yielded. Now he presented himself to her in the guise of a reaper, with his basket of corn-ears on his arm; now he was a haymaker, fresh from tossing the hay in the meadow, with a wisp of grass wound round his brows; now he was a ploughman with an ox-goad in his hand, as if he had just unyoked the weary oxen on the furrowed field; again he showed himself as a pruner of vines with his pruning-knife; or he carried a ladder on which to climb the fruit-trees and pluck the ripening apples from the boughs he even took the shape of a fisherman with his rod and of a soldier with his sword. But all in vain; the shy goddess still said no, till at last he doffed his disguises and appeared in his own proper form, as the sun breaks through clouds to shine in undimmed radiance. Thus Vertumnus won Pomona’s love. In this description of the god’s successive transformations Ovid clearly borrowed much of his imagery from Propertius, who enumerates an even greater variety of personages into which this Italian Proteus could convert himself at will, among them a girl in Coan silk, a tipsy reveller, a hunter, a fowler, a charioteer, a circus-rider, a pedlar, a shepherd, and one who carried baskets of roses on summer’s dusty ways. More briefly, Tibullus alludes to the thousand varied garbs which Vertumnus could assume, and every one of which sat well on him. Thus, if we accept the evidence of the poets, Vertumnus was a sort of heavenly harlequin.
Portunus (vi. 547).—Portunus was a genuine old Latin god; Virgil calls him Father Portunus, and represents him as giving a shove to one of the galleys in the race instituted, with other games, by Aeneas in honour of his father Anchises. The antiquity of his worship is indicated by the circumstance that it was in charge of a special flamen (Flamen Portunalis), one of whose duties, oddly enough, was to anoint the arms of the god Quirinus with ointment drawn from a special vessel, coated with pitch, called a persillum. A festival called the Portunalia was held in his honour on the seventeenth of August; it is mentioned in many ancient calendars, of which three (the Amiternine, the Valensian, and the Allifanine) add a note explaining that the Portunalia was a festival celebrated in honour of Portunus at the Aemllian bridge. Hence, when Varro tells us that “the Portunalia is named after Portunus, to whom on that day a temple was dedicated in the port of Tiber (in portu Tiberino) and a festival instituted,” we may assume that “the port of the Tiber,” and with it the temple of Portunus, was at Rome near the Aemilian bridge, and not at the mouth of the Tiber, at Ostia, as Th. Mommsen supposed.
As to the nature and functions of Portunus the ancients seem to have hesitated whether to derive his name from portus, “port,” “harbour,” or from porta, “gate,” and consequently whether to regard him as the guardian deity of harbours or of gates. Ovid clearly takes the former view, for he says (line 546) that Portunus was given all authority over harbours. Cicero seems to have been of the same mind, for he derived the name of Portunus from portus, “port” and Virgil apparently adopted the same opinion, for in his description of the race between the galleys he makes Portunus help the winning galley “into port.” Consistently with this etymology, Virgil’s old commentator Servius, in a note on this passage, describes Portunus as “a marine god who presides over harbours.” On the other hand, Festus, or rather his abbreviator Paulus, informs us that the guardianship of the key was thought to be with Portunus, who was supposed to hold a key in his hand and was thought to be “the god of gates.” A scholiast on Virgil says that Portunus was usually painted holding a key in his hand. Varro combined both etymologies and functions, for he described Portunus as “the guardian of harbours and gates.” In favour of the connexion of Portunus with gates rather than with harbours it has been pointed out that the temple of Janus, who in one at least of his aspects was certainly a god of gates, was dedicated on the same day as the temple of Portunus, that is, on August 17. Taking this along with his emblem the key, which was also an emblem of Janus, we may perhaps conclude with Wissowa that Portunus was primarily a god of gates (portarum) and only secondarily a god of harbours (portuum). There seems to be reason to think that originally portus and porta differed only in sound, not in sense.
The site of the Aemilian bridge, near which stood the temple of Portunus, is not certain, but it seems to have coincided roughly with that of the modern Ponte Rotto, now removed. In the flat ground on the left bank of the Tiber at this point there are two well-preserved ancient temples which have been converted into churches under the names of S. Maria Egiziaca and S. Maria del Sole, and the former has been conjecturally identified by Huelsen with the temple of Mother Matuta. The same eminent topographer would identify the church of S. Maria del Sole with the temple of Portunus.