Part 22

Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "cinctus Gabinus."

Marquardt, p. 340. The Vestals were never, so far as we know, directly concerned in animal sacrifice.

See below, p. 190. For the colour of the garments, and the explanation referred to, see Samter, Familienfeste, p. 40 foll.; Diels, Sibyllinische Blaetter, p. 70; and cp. von Duhn's paper, "Rot und Tot" in Archiv, 1906, p. 1 foll. That red colouring was used in various ways in sacred and quasi-sacred rites there is no doubt (see above, p. 89, note 46); but whether it can be always connected with bloodshed is by no means so certain (Rohde, Psyche, i. 226). In the case of women it is at least hard to understand. The idea of consecration through blood, which is very rare in Roman literature, comes out curiously in the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Virginius after the slaughter of his daughter (iii. 48): "Te Appi tuumque caput sanguine hoc consecro" (i.e. to a deity not mentioned). The sentence to which this note refers was written before the appearance of Messrs. Hubert et Mauss' essay on sacrifice (Melanges d'histoire des religions, pp. 1-122). The theory there developed, that the victim is the intermediary in all cases between the sacrificer and the deity, and that the force religieuse passes from one to the other in one direction or another, does not essentially differ from the words in the text; but the French savants would, I imagine, prefer to look on the insignia in a general sense as bringing the person wearing them within the region of the sacrum, the force of which would react on him still more strongly after the destruction of the victim (see p. 28 foll.).

See, e.g., Roman Sculpture by Mrs. Strong, Plates xi. and xv.

For this and other insignia see Marquardt, p. 222 foll. The question is under discussion whether some of these insignia are not old Italian forms of dress (see Gruppe, Mythologische Literatur, 1898-1905, p. 343). For the wearing of the skin of a victim, which meets us also at the Lupercalia (R.F. p. 311), see Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 416 foll.; Jevons, Introduction, p. 252 foll.; Frazer, G.B. iii. 136 foll.

They, of course, wore the praetexta when performing religious acts. Cp. the Fratres Arvales, who laid aside the praetexta after sacrificing. Henzen, Acta Fr. Arv. pp. 11, 21, and 28.

Serv. Aen. xi. 543. The camillae assisted the flaminicae, Marquardt, p. 227. This is one of the most beautiful features of the stately Roman ritual, and has been handed on to the Roman Church. It was, of course, derived from the worship of the household (see above, p. 74).

Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 413 foll. Dr. Frazer is criticising Dr. Farnell, who had touched on the subject in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 689, and had taken the more obvious view that death in a family disqualified for actions requiring extreme holiness.

The passages are collected in Marquardt, p. 174 foll.; we may notice in particular Livy xlv. 5. 4, where, though only the washing of hands is referred to, we have the important statement that "omnis praefatio sacrorum," i.e. the preliminary exhortation of the priest, enjoined purae manus. Livy must be using the language of Roman ritual, though he is not speaking here of a Roman rite. For the material of sacred utensils see Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 30.

Tibullus ii. 1. 11.

Cic. de Legibus, ii. 10. 24.

Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 352 foll.; consult the index for further allusions to the subject. Cp. Farnell, Evolution of Religion, Lecture III. [Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen, 1910), has reached me too late for use in this chapter.]

Full details, with the most important references quoted in full, are in Marquardt, p. 172 foll.; but some of the latter are applicable only to the Graeco-Roman period.

So we may gather from the Lex Furfensis of 58 B.C. (C.I.L. ix. 3513), and that of the Ara Augusti at Narbo of A.D. 12 (C.I.L. xii. 4333).

The real origin of the pontifices and their name is unknown to us. If they took their name from the bridging of the Tiber, as Varro held (L.L. v. 83) and as the majority of scholars believe (see O. Gilbert, Rom. Topographie, ii. 220, note), the difficulty remains that they are found in such a city as Praeneste, where there was no river to be bridged, and where they could not well have been merely an offshoot from the Roman college; see Wissowa, R.K. p. 432, note. Nor can we explain how they came to be set in charge of the ius divinum; and where there are no data conjecture is useless.

The covering of the head (operto capite, as opposed to aperto capite of the Graecus ritus) is usually explained as meant to shut out all sounds belonging to the world of the profanum; and the playing of the tibicines is interpreted in the same way. Hubert et Mauss explain the covered head differently: "le rituel romain prescrivit generalement l'usage du voile, signe de separation et partant de consecration" (p. 28). Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 522, also holds that it is the outward sign of consecration; cp. S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes, et religions, i. 300 foll. The fact, noted by Miss Harrison, that in Festus's account of the ver sacrum (p. 379, ed. Mueller) the children expelled were veiled, seems to point to the idea of dedication—unless, indeed, velabant here means that they blindfolded them.

The wine was poured over the altar as well as on the victim, which suggests a substitution for blood; Arnobius vii. 29 and 30; Dion. Hal. vii. 72. I cannot find that any one of the many utensils used in sacrifice were for pouring out blood. Blood was, however, poured on the stone at the Terminalia (R.F. pp. 325-326); but the rite here described by Ovid seems to be a rural one, outside the ius divinum. In the sacrifice of victims to Hecate in Virg. Aen. vi. 243 foll., which cannot be ritus Romanus, the warm blood is collected in paterae; but nothing is said of what was done with it, nor does Servius help. Cp. Aen. viii. 106. In Lucretius v. 1202, "aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum," the context shows that the ritual alluded to is not old Roman. In Livy's description of the "occulti paratus sacri" of the Samnites (ix. 41), we find "respersae fando nefandoque sanguine arae, et dira exsecratio ac furiale carmen." Livy seems to think of this blood-sprinkling, whether the blood be human or animal, as unusual and horrible. Ancient, no doubt, is the practice, recorded in the Acta Fratr. Arv. (see Henzen, pp. 21 and 23), of using the blood in a religious feast, in the process of cooking: "porcilias piaculares epulati sunt et sanguem." (There is a mention of the pouring of blood in an inscription from Lusitania in C.I.L. ii. 2395.) For the use of wine as a substitute for blood, see the recently published work of Karl Kircher, "Die sakrale Bedeuting des Weines," in Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche, etc., p. 82 foll., where, however, the subject is not worked out.

According to Luebbert (Commentarii pontificales, p. 121 foll.) magmentum is the same as augmentum, which word is also found (Varro, L.L. v. 112). Festus, p. 126, "magmentum magis augmentum"; Serv. Aen. iv. 57, to which passage I shall return. For the equivalent in the Vedic ritual of the cooking and offering of the exta, see Hubert et Mauss, op. cit. p. 60 foll.

R.F. p. 89.

ib. p. 10.

Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 60, 69, etc. Of course the prayer might be said while other operations were going on. For the constant connection of prayer and sacrifice, see Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 10, "quippe victimam caedi sine precatione non videtur referre aut deos rite consuli." If Macrobius is right (iii. 2. 7 foll.) in asserting that the prayer must be said while the priest's hand touches the altar, one may guess that this was done at the same time that the exta were laid on it. Ovid saw the priest at the Robigalia offer the exta and say the prayer at the same time (Fasti, iv. 905 foll.), but does not mention the hand touching the altar. For this see Serv. Aen. vi. 124; Horace, Ode iii. 23. 17, and Dr. Postgate on this passage in Classical Review for March 1910.

Cato, R.R. 132, 134, 139, and 141. That these formulae were taken from the books of the pontifices is almost certain, not only from the internal evidence of the prayers themselves, but because Servius (Interpol.) on Aen. ix. 641 quotes the words: "macte hoc vino inferio esto," which occur in 132, introducing them thus: "et in pontificalibus sacrificantes dicebant deo...."

The verb is omitted here for some ritualistic reason, as in the Iguvian prayers (Umbrica, p. 55).

Virg. Aen. ix. 641, "macte nova virtute puer, sic itur ad astra," etc., and many other passages. The verb mactare acquired a general sense of sacrificial slaying, as did also immolare, though neither had originally any direct reference to slaughter. The best account I find of the word is in H. Nettleship's Contributions to Latin Lexicography, p. 520. He takes mactus as the participle of a lost verb maco or mago, to make great, increase, equivalent to augeo, which is also a word of semi-religious meaning, as Augustus knew. Nettleship quotes Cicero in Vatinium, 14, "puerorum extis deos manes mactare."

Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Lat. 180; Lusilius fragm. 143; Nonius, 341, 28 has "versibus."

It may possibly be objected that some of the deities were powerful for evil as well as good, e.g. Robigus, the spirit of the red mildew, and that the power of such a deity was not to be encouraged or increased. But all such deities (and I cannot mention another besides Robigus) were of course conceived as able to restrain their own harmful function; they were not invoked to go away and leave the ager Romanus in peace, but to limit their activity in the land where they had been settled for worship. We have no prayer to Robigus (or Robigo, feminine, as Ovid has it) except that which Ovid somewhat fancifully versified after hearing the Flamen Quirinalis say it (Fasti, iv. 911 foll.), in which of course the word macte does not occur. As the victim was a dog, an uneatable one, it is possible that the ritual was not quite the usual one. But the language of the prayer is interesting and brings out my point:

aspera Robigo, parcas Cerialibus herbis. vis tua non levis est;... parce precor, scabrasque manus a messibus aufer neve noce cultis: posse nocere sat est.

It concludes by praying Robigo to direct her strength and attention to other objects, gladios et tela nocentia; but this is the poet's fancy.

Evolution of Religion, p. 212, quoting Vedic Hymns, pt. ii. pp. 259 and 391.

Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. ii. p. 585 foll.; cp. 657. See also Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 195.

See above, p. 9. Religio in the sense of an obligation to perform certain ritualistic acts is in my view a secondary and later use of the word. See Transactions of the Congress of Historical Religion for 1908, vol. ii. p. 169 foll.

Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26 foll.; C.I.L. vi. 2104, 32 foll.; Buecheler und Riese, Carmina Lat., epigr. pars ii., no. 1. All surviving Roman prayers are collected in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, Giessen, 1909.

Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 10 foll.

In Anthropology and the Classics, p. 94.

Cp. Tibullus ii. 1. 84, "vos celebrem cantate deum pecorique vocate, Voce palam pecori, clam sibi quisque vocet." This murmuring was certainly characteristic of Roman magic; see Jevons, p. 99, and especially the reference to a Lex Cornelia, which condemned those "qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt" (Justinian, Inst. iv. 18. 5).

On the nature of this tripodatio see Henzen, op. cit. p. 33. Buecheler, Umbrica, p. 69, gives the Umbrian verb a different meaning, though he translates it tripodato.

Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 13 and 52.

Wissowa, R.K., 333, inclines to the belief that prayer had a legal binding force upon the deity; but he does not cite any text which confirms this view, and is arguing on general grounds. I gather from the language of Aust (Religion der Roemer, p. 30) that he thinks there was a germ which might have developed into a more truly religious attitude towards the gods, if it had not been killed by priestly routine and quasi-legal formulae. With this opinion I am strongly inclined to agree. Cp. the story of Scipio Aemilianus audaciously altering and elevating the formula dictated by the priest in the censor's lustratio (Val. Max. iv. 1. 10), to which I shall return in the proper place.

Westphal, quoted by De Marchi, La Religione, etc., i. p. 133, note.

See, e.g., ch. 141 ad fin. The prayer in the Acta of the Ludi Saeculares to the Moirae is an imitation of old prayers. See below, p. 442.

ib. ch. 139.

ib. ch. 141.

Hubert et Mauss, Melanges d'histoire des religions, p. 74.

So Cato, R.R. 141, "si minus in omnes litabit, sic verba concipito; Mars pater, quod tibi illuc porco neque satisfactum est, te hoc porco piaculo." (The word for the slaughter is here euphemistically omitted; De Marchi, p. 134.)

Hubert et Mauss, op. cit. p. 55 foll.; Leviticus vi. I doubt whether the theory of the learned authors will hold good generally on this point.

Marquardt, p. 185, asserted the contrary, but cited no evidence except Serv. Aen. vi. 253, which does not prove the practice of the holocaust to be really Roman. Wissowa's exactness is well illustrated in his detection of this error; see R. K. p. 352, note 6. Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 135, leaves no doubt on the question possible.

Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 131. See above, p. 35. Festus, p. 218.

Gellius iv. 6. 7.

i.e. lustratio. That this was a form of piaculum is clear from the use of the word pihaklu of the victim in the lustratio of the arx of Iguvium, e.g. Buecheler, Umbrica, index, 5, v.

LECTURE IX

RITUAL—continued

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

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

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

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

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

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