Part 14

The word thus suggests that the Roman divine beings were functional spirits with will-power, their functions being indicated by their adjectival names. Proper names they had not as a rule, but they are getting cult-titles under the influence of a priesthood, which titles may in time perhaps attain to something of the definiteness of substantival names. This indeed could hardly have been so in the mind of the ordinary Roman even at a later age; and it is quite possible that if an intelligent Greek traveller of the sixth century B.C. had given an account of the gods of Rome, he would have said, as Strabo said of an Iberian people in the time of Augustus, that they were without gods, or worshipped gods without names. But the name, even as a cult-title, is of immense importance in the development of a spirit into a deity, and in most cases, at any rate at Rome, it was the work of officials, of a state priesthood, not of the people. To address a deity rightly was matter of no small difficulty: how were you to know how he would wish to be addressed? Servius tells us that the pontifices addressed even Jupiter himself thus: "Iupiter optime maxime, sive quo alio nomine te appellari volueris." On the other hand, in the same comment he tells us that "iure pontificio cautum est, ne suis nominibus di Romani appellarentur, ne exaugurari possent," i.e. lest they should be enticed away from the city by enemies. This last statement seems indeed to me to be a doubtful one, but it will serve to illustrate the nervousness about divine names, of which there is no doubt whatever. We know for certain that those religious lawyers the pontifices were greatly occupied with the task of drawing up lists of names by which numina should be invoked,—formularising the ritual of prayer, as we shall see in another lecture; and this must have become at one time almost a craze with them, to judge by the lists of Indigitamenta preserved in their books, to which Varro had access, and which were copied from him by St. Augustine. But after all it needed the stimulus given by actual contact with a polytheistic system to turn a Roman numen into a full-fledged personal deity: the pontifices might carry the process some way, but they never could have completed it themselves without the help of the Greeks.

One deity seems to stand alone in the list—Tellus or Terra Mater, Mother Earth. We are coming directly to the great deity of the heaven, and we might naturally expect that an agricultural folk would be much concerned with her who is his counterpart among so many peoples. She does not give her name to any of the festivals of the calendar; but at one of them, the Fordicidia in April, at a time when the earth is teeming with mysterious power, and when the festivals are of a peculiarly agricultural character, she has her own special sacrifice—a pregnant cow, whose young are torn from her womb, burnt by the Virgo vestalis maxima, and their ashes used in certain mystic rites, e.g. at the Parilia which followed on the 21st. She seems to have had her function in human life as well; but about this we are much in the dark in spite of Dieterich's attempts to elucidate it in his Mutter Erde. Whether she played a part at the birth of a child we cannot be sure; but at marriage there is little doubt that she was originally an object of worship, though in later days she gave way before Ceres and Juno. And as at death the body was laid in her embrace, we are not surprised to find her prominent here also: she was the home of the dead whether buried or burnt, and of the whole mass of the Manes. We shall presently see how a Roman commander might devote himself and the whole army of the enemy to Tellus and the Manes; and it is interesting to find that a similar formula of devotio, of later date, combines Tellus with Jupiter, the speaker touching the ground when he mentions her name, and holding his hands upwards to heaven when he names the god. Very curious, too, is the rite of the porca praecidanea, which in historical times was offered to Ceres as well as Tellus immediately before harvest; in case a man had wittingly or unwittingly omitted to pay the proper rites (iusta facere) to his own dead, it was his duty to make this offering, lest as a result of the neglect the earth-power should not yield him a good harvest. Originally, we need hardly doubt, Tellus was alone concerned in this; but Ceres, who at all times represented rather the ripening and ripened corn than the seed in the bosom of the earth, gradually took her place beside her, and the idea gained ground that the offering was more immediately concerned with the harvest than with the Manes. When Cato wrote his book on agriculture, he included in it the proper formula for this sacrifice, without any indication that Tellus or the Manes had any part in the business. Tellus was not a deity whose life would be vigorous in a busy City-state destined gradually to lose its agricultural outlook; there the supply of grain, from whatever quarter it might come, was a far more important matter than the process of producing it, and it was natural that Ceres and her April festival should become more popular than Tellus and her Fordicidia, and that the Cerealia should eventually develop into ludi of no less than eight days' duration. Yet Tellus survived in such forms as that of the devotio; and even under the Empire we find her as Terra on sepulchral monuments, e.g.—

ereptam viro et matri mater me Terra recepit,

or

terra mater rerum quod dedit ipsa teget.

And there is a curious story, noticed by Wissowa and by Dieterich after him, that on the death of Tiberius the plebs shouted not only "Tiberius in Tiberim," but "Terram matrem deosque Manes," in order that his lot might be among the impii beneath the earth.

So far we have met with nothing to suggest that the Roman idea of divinity had passed much beyond an advanced type of animism; we have found little or no trace of personal deities of a polytheistic cast. There is, however, a fact of importance now to be considered, which has some bearing upon this difficult subject. Some of the numina of the calendar had special priests attached to their cults; e.g. among those I have already mentioned, Volcanus, Furrina, Portunus, and Volturnus, to which we may now add Pales, Flora, Carmenta, Pomona, and a wholly unknown deity, Falacer. These nine all had flamines, a word which is generally derived from flare, i.e. they were the kindlers of the sacrificial fire. Sacrificing priests they undoubtedly always were, each limited to the sacrificial rites of a particular cult, unless authorised by religious law to undertake those of some other deity whose name he did not bear, and who was destitute, like Robigus, of a priest of his own. We have no certain evidence that all these flamines were of high antiquity; but those attached to deities of the calendar were probably of earlier origin than that document, and as we have no record of the creation of a new flaminium in historical times until the era of Caesar-worship, it is fair to conclude that the others I have mentioned were not younger.

Now what bearing has this fact on the question as to how the early Romans conceived the objects of their worship? There are, of course, so-called priests all the world over, even among the lowest fetishistic and animistic peoples, who exercise power over the various kinds of spirits by potent charms and spells; these should rather be called wizards, medicine-men, magicians, and so on. But the flamines as we know them were not such; they were officials of a State, entrusted with the performance of definite ritualistic duties, more particularly with sacrifice, and therefore, as we may assume from universal Roman practice so far as we know it, also with prayer. If they did not actually slay the victims themselves—and in historical times this was done by an assistant—they superintended the whole process and were responsible for its correct performance. Does the existence of such priests come into relation with the development of the idea of a deus out of a numen or a spirit? What is the influence of the sacrificing priest on the divinity whom he serves? This last is a question to which it is not easy to find a ready answer; the history of priesthood, and of the moral and intellectual results of the institution, has yet to be written. Even Dr. Westermarck, in his recently published great work on the development of moral ideas, has little to say of it. It is greatly complicated by the undoubted fact that among many peoples, perhaps to some extent even among the Latins, the earliest real priests had a tendency to personate the deity themselves, to be considered as the deity, or in some sense divine. But in regard to Roman priests we may, I think, go at least as far as this. When a spirit was named and localised as a friendly being at a particular spot within the walls of the city, which is made over to him, and where he has his ara; when the ritual performed at this spot is laid down in definite detail, and undertaken by an individual appointed for this purpose by the head of the community with solemn ceremony; then the spirit, hitherto but vaguely conceived, must in course of time become individualised. The priestly if not the popular conception of him is fixed; there is now no question who he is or how he should be called; "quis deus incertum est" can no longer be said of him. Once provided with a flamen and an ordered cult of sacrifice and prayer, I conceive that he had now in him the possibility of turning into a deus personally conceived, if he came by the chance. A few did get the chance; others did not; Volcanus, for example, became a god after the model of the Greek Hephaestus, while Volturnus remained a numen and made no further progress, though he was doubtless ready to "take" the Graecising epidemic when it came. I do not say that he or any other numen was the better for the change. But I must not now pursue the story of this strange double fate of the old Roman deities; I have perhaps said enough to show that city life, with its priesthoods and its ordered ritual, had some appreciable effect on the deities who were admitted to it.

Among these deities there were four of whom I have as yet said nothing at all, though they are the most famous of all the divine inhabitants of Rome. I have mentioned nine flamines; there were in all twelve, and besides these there was in historical times a priest known as the rex sacrorum, the republican successor to some of the religious functions of the civil king. This rex, and the three flamines maiores, so called in contra-distinction to the other nine, were specially attached to the cults of Janus, Jupiter (Flamen Dialis), Mars (Flamen Martialis), and Quirinus (Flamen Quirinalis). I have kept these deities apart from the others already mentioned, not only because their priests stand apart from the rest, but because they themselves seem from the first to have been more really gods (dei); Quirinus is the only one who has an adjectival name. Two of them, Jupiter and Mars, remained throughout Roman history of real importance to the State, and in Jupiter there were at least some germs of possible development into a deity capable of influencing conduct and enforcing morality. Of Janus this cannot possibly be said; and as he is historically the least important of the four, I will begin by saying a few words about him as a puzzle and a curiosity only.

Janus, ever since he ceased to be an intelligible deity, has been the sport of speculators; and this happened long before the Roman religion came to an end. In the last century B.C. philosophic writers about the gods got hold of him, and Varro tells us that some made him out to be the heaven, others the universe (mundus). Ovid amused himself with this uncertainty of the philosophers, and in the first book of his Fasti "interviewed" the god, whose answers are unluckily of little value for us. At various times and in different hands Janus has been pronounced a sun-god, a heaven-god, a year-god, a wind-god; and now a Cambridge school of speculators, to whose learning I am in many ways indebted, has claimed him as an oak-god, the mate of Diana, the Jupiter of aboriginal Latium, and so on. We have fortunately long left behind us the age when it was thought necessary to resolve the Greek and Roman gods into personifications of natural phenomena, and to try to explain all their attributes on one principle; but my learned friends at Cambridge have of late been showing a tendency to return to methods not less dangerous; they hanker, for example, after etymological evidence, which in the case of deities is almost sure to be misleading unless it is absolutely certain, and supported by the history of the name. This is unluckily not the case with Janus; his etymology is matter of dispute, and he is therefore open, and always will be so, to the inquirer who is hunting a scent, and more concerned to prove a point than to discover what the early Romans really thought about a god. In this lecture I am but humbly trying to do this last, and I may therefore leave etymology, with the mythology and philosophy of a later age, and confine myself to such facts of the cult of Janus as are quite undisputed. They will admit of being put together very shortly.

The first and leading fact is that Janus was the first deity to be addressed in all prayers and invocations; of this we have abundant evidence, as also of the corresponding fact that Vesta came last. Secondly, we know that he was the object of worship on the Kalends of January, and probably of every month, and that the sacrificing priest was in this case the rex sacrorum. Thirdly, we know that he had no temple until the year 260 B.C., but that he was associated with the famous gateway at the north-east end of the Forum—not a gate in the wall, but a symbolic entrance to the heart of the city, as the round temple of Vesta at the opposite end, with its eternal fire, was symbolic of the common life of the community. Fourthly, we know a few cult-titles of Janus, among them Clusius (or Clusivius), and Patulcius, in which the connection with gates is obvious; Junonius, which may have originated in the fact that Juno also was worshipped on the Kalends; Matutinus, which seems to be a late reference to the dawn as the opening or gate of the day, and Quirinus, which last is also almost certainly of late origin. Clusius and Patulcius are genuine old titles, if the text of the Salian hymn is rightly interpreted; so too is another, Curiatius, for it was used of the god only as residing in an ancient gateway near the Subura called the tigillum sororium. These are all the most important facts we have to go upon; the double head of Janus on the earliest Roman as is of uncertain origin, and Wissowa seems to have conclusively shown that this representation was not admitted to the gate called Janus Geminus until towards the close of the republican period. The connection of the god with the fortress on the hill across the Tiber, which still bears his name, admits of no quite satisfactory explanation.

Now if we recall the fact that the entrance to the house and the entrance to a city were points of great moment, and the cause of constant anxiety to the early Italian mind, we may naturally infer that they would be in the care of some particular numen, and that his worship would be in the care of the head of the family or community—in the case of the city, in the care of the rex, whose duties of this kind were afterwards taken over by the priest called rex sacrorum. The fact that the word for an entrance was ianus confirms this conjecture; Janus was perhaps the spirit guarding the entrance to the real wall of the earliest city, but when the city was enlarged in the age from which the calendar dates, a symbolic gateway was set up where you entered the forum from the direction of Latium, answering to the symbolic hearth in the aedes Vestae, and this very naturally took the name of the deity associated with entrances. Two other iani probably existed in the forum, and the name was later on transferred as a substantive to similar objects in Roman colonies, while a feminine form, ianua, came to be used for ordinary house entrances. Whether there ever was a cult of the god at the real gateway of a city we do not know; there was none at the symbolic gateway of Rome, which was in no sense a temple. But the idea of entrance stuck to the old spirit of the doorway long after the reconstruction of the city, and the rex now sacrifices to him on the entrance-day of each month, and more particularly on the entrance-day of the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the original Janus, a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious double-head on the as and the gateway, and for whom they could find no conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.

Next in order of invocation to Janus came Jupiter, and his priest, the Flamen Dialis, was likewise the second in rank, according to ancient rule, after the rex sacrorum. Unlike Janus, Jupiter (to use the spelling familiar in England) was at all times a great power for the Roman people, and one who could be all the more valued because he was intelligible. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he was the god of the light and of heaven, Diovis pater, or rather perhaps the heaven itself with all its manifestations of rain and thunder, of blessing and damage to the works of man; the common inheritance of the Italian peoples, dwelling and worshipped in their woods and on their hills; and, as we know now, also the common inheritance of all Aryan stocks, the "European Sky-god," as Mr. A. B. Cook has traced him with learning and ingenuity from the Euxine to Britain.

Jupiter must have had a long and important history in Latium before the era of the Roman City-state; Dr. Frazer has seen this, and set it forth in his lectures on the early history of the kingship, though basing his conclusions on evidence much of which will not bear a close examination. The one substantial proof of it lies in the unique and truly extraordinary character of the taboos placed on his flamen, and to some extent on the flamen's wife, by the Roman ius divinum. Even if we suppose that some of these may have been later inventions of an ecclesiastical college like the pontifices (and this is hardly probable), many of them are obviously of remote antiquity, and can only have originated at a time when the magical power of the man responsible for the conduct of Jupiter was so precious that it had to be safeguarded in these many curious ways. I have already suggested that the scene of the early paramount importance of Jupiter and his flamen, in that age perhaps a king of some kind, was Alba Longa, which by universal tradition was the leading city of Latium before Rome rose to importance, and where the sky-god was worshipped on his holy mountain as the religious centre of Latium from the earliest times. I have also suggested that when the new warlike city on the Tiber took the place of Alba, the worship was transferred thither, but lost its strength in the process, and that the flamen was little more than a survival even in the most primitive period of what we may call for the moment Roman history. This can be accounted for by the fact that the traditions of primitive Rome were connected much more closely with Mars than with Jupiter. Not till Etruscan kings founded the great temple on the Capitol, which was to endure throughout all later ages of Roman dominion, did the sky-god become the supreme guardian deity of his people, under the titles of Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest of all her deities.