Part 24

We should naturally expect that this sacred boundary would have its holiness secured or revived by an annual lustratio like that of the farm and pagus; and so no doubt it was. But the memory of this survives only in the word amburbium, which, on the analogy of ambarvalia, must mean a rite of this processional kind. Luckily we have definite knowledge of the real lustratio of a city in those ritualistic inscriptions of Iguvium which I have more than once referred to. It is the lustratio of the arx, the citadel of Iguvium, which we may guess to have been the original oppidum or germ of the historical city. The details are complex, and show clear traces of priestly organisation; but the main features stand out unmistakably. A procession goes round the arx (ocris Fisia), with the suovetaurilia—ox, sheep, and pig—as in the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, while sacrifice and prayer are offered on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. There were three gates, and each of them is the scene of sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, and they need to be strengthened by annual religious operations; such at least is the most obvious explanation. Whether the Fratres Attiedii would have been able to explain it thus we may doubt; neither in the sacrificial ritual nor in the prayers, as recorded in the inscription, do we find any clear trace of a distinction between the sacred and the profane, or of the idea of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary. So far as we can judge from the prayers, the object is really a religious one, to implore the deities of the city to preserve it and all within it. The language of these prayers hardly differs from that in which a Christian Church of to-day asks for a blessing on a community.

So far I have been speaking of the permanent separation of land or city by a sacred boundary line from the profane world without. But human beings en masse might be subjected to the same process—an army, for example, at the opening of the season of war; and so, too, might its appurtenances—horses, arms, and trumpets. In the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who passed some years in Rome in the time of Augustus, we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host and sacrificed to Mars. This was doubtless the early form of the political census, which had a military meaning and origin. But we have a more exact and reliable account of a similar rite in the Iguvian documents, which contain instructions for the lustratio of the people apparently before a campaign. So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the male population was assembled in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round this host a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer to Mars and two female associates of his power, the object of which, as we can read in the words of the prayer, was to bless the people of Iguvium and to curse its enemies, who were to be confounded and frightened and paralysed.

Here religion of a rude sort has been superimposed on the originally magical ceremonial. For the idea must have been that by drawing a "magic circle" around the host, which might have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the ager Romanus (or Iguvinus), where hostile magical influences might be brought to bear against them, they were in some mysterious way marked off, rendered "holy," and so protected against the wiles of the enemy. A later and animistic age would think of them as needing protection against hostile spirits, of whose ways and freaks they were of course entirely ignorant. Of these primitive ideas about the danger of entering hostile territory and of leaving your own, Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in his Golden Bough (i. 304 foll.), both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. A single parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which Dr. Frazer has not mentioned, may suffice us here. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring between the severed limbs of a dog: the principle is here the same as in Italy, but the method differs slightly. In each case some mysterious influence is brought to bear on the whole army without exception; but in the one case a line is drawn round it, in the other it passes through the parts of an object which must have been supposed to be endowed with magical power.

And once more, in spring before the season of arms, all the belongings of the host were subjected to some process of the same kind. I have alluded to this in my lecture on the calendar, and need not now reproduce the evidence of the Equirria at the end of February and on March 14, or of the Quinquatrus on March 19, when the lustratio took place of the shields (ancilia) of the Salii, the war-priests of Mars, and the Tubilustrium on March 23, which tells its own tale. But I may recall the fact that the calendar supplies us also with evidence that on the return of the host to their own territory all these lustrations had to be repeated in order to rid men, horses, arms, and trumpets of such evil contagion as they might have contracted during their absence. It may be that one special object of lustration after the return of an army was to rid it, with all belonging to it, of the taint of bloodshed, just as the Jewish warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp. But in the Roman pontifical law this idea is hardly discernible, and the only trace I can find of it is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general's car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem." I may add here that the passage of a triumphing army through the Porta triumphalis, which was probably an isolated arch in the Campus Martius just outside the city wall, most likely had as its original meaning the separation of the host from the profane world in which it had been moving; and the triumphal arches of later times, which were within the city, were thus developed architecturally from an origin which belongs to the region of magic. To the same class of ideas, if I am not much mistaken, belongs the familiar Italian practice of compelling a surrendered army to pass under the yoke. As Livy explains this when he first mentions it, it was symbolical of subjection: "ut exprimatur confessio subactam domitamque esse gentem"; and this was no doubt the idea in the minds of the historical Romans. But it may well have been that it had its root in a process which was supposed to deprive the conquered enemy of all dangerous contagion—to separate them from their own land and people before they came into peaceful contact with their conquerors.

A last word before I leave this part of my subject. Though it is interesting to try to get at the root-idea of these processes of lustratio, we must remember that in the Rome of history they had lost not only such magical meaning as they ever had, but also much of the religious meaning which in course of time was superimposed upon it. The sacrifices and the prayers remained, but the latter were muttered and unheard by the people. And except in the country districts these ceremonies were more and more absorbed, as time went on, into the social, military, and political life of the community, as e.g. the lustration of the host became a political census; or they tended to disappear altogether, like the ambarvalia and perhaps the amburbium. They grew up in the religious experience of the Romans, beginning with its very earliest and quasi-magical forms; but they came at last to represent that experience no longer, and when we meet with them in historical times it is impossible to ascribe to them any real influence on life and conduct. Lustratio never in pagan Italy developed an ethical meaning as catharsis did in Greece. But meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire, until the Roman Church adapted them to its own ritual and gave them, as we saw, a new meaning. As the cloud-shadows still move slowly over the hollows of the Apennines, so does the procession of the patron saint pass still through the streets of many an Italian city.

NOTES TO LECTURE IX

Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 63.

See Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 615 foll.

C.I.L. i. Nos. 43 foll.

C.I.L. xiv. 2863. See R.F. p. 224, and Wissowa, R.K. p. 209.

Op. cit. vol. i. p. 252; cp. 271.

See Sir Alfred Lyall's Asiatic Studies, Series I. ch. vi. No one would call the vow of Aeneas, in Aen. vi. 69, a bargain with Apollo and the Sibyl.

Marquardt, p. 266; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i.2 594 foll. The ceremony is best described by Ovid, Ex Ponto, iv. 9. 5 foll. He is addressing the consul of the year from his place of exile:

at cum Tarpeias esses deductus in arces, dum caderet iussu victima sacra tuo, me quoque secreto grates sibi magnus agentem audisset media qui sedet aede deus. (II. 28 foll.)

Valerius Maximus iv. 1. 10.

A list of these is given in Aust, De aedibus sacris populi Romani (Marpurg, 1889). A valuable work, which will be of service to us later on.

Livy xxxvi. 2. 3.

Ib. xxii. 10.

Ib. sec. 6. The meaning is that if any one has stolen an animal which was intended to be dedicated, no blame attaches to the person so robbed; and that if a man performs his dedication on a day of ill omen unwittingly, it will hold good none the less.

Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 195.

The fact that words like reus and damnatus were applied respectively to persons who had made a vow and to those who had performed it, i.e. as being liable like a defendant, and then released from that position by a verdict or sentence (see Wissowa, R.K. p. 320), is of course significant of the idea of the transaction in the mind of the Roman, who, as Macrobius says (iii. 2. 6) se numinibus obligat, as an accused person is obligatus to the authorities of the State (Mommsen, Strafrecht, 189 foll.). It is the natural tendency of the Roman mind to give all transactions a legal sanction; but it does not thence follow that the original idea was really thought of as a contract, and we have only to reflect that the final act was a thank-offering to see the difference between the civil and the religious process.

Livy v. 21.

Macr. iii. 9, 6. He says that he found it in the fifth book of Res reconditae by one Sammonicus Serenus, and that the latter had himself found it "in cuiusdam Furii vetustissimo libro."

On this subject see article "Devotio" in Pauly-Wissowa.

Livy viii. 10, "licere consuli dictatori praetori...." Cp. Cic. de Nat. deorum, ii. 10, "at vero apud maiores tanta religionis vis fuit, ut quidam imperatores etiam se ipsos dis immortalibus capite velato certis verbis pro republica devoverent."

See Muenzer's article "Decii" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl.; Soltau, Die Anfaenge der roem. Geschichtschreibung, p. 48 foll.

Livy viii. 9 foll.; Dio Cassius, fragment, xxxv. 6; Ennius, Ann. vi. 147, Baehrens. The latter fragment is the oldest reference to the event which we possess, and just sufficient to confirm Livy's account: "Divi hoc audite parumper, ut pro Romano populo prognariter armis certando prudens animum de corpore mitto."

It is worth remarking that the sacrificial aspect struck St. Augustine. In Civ. Dei, v. 18, he writes: "Si se occidendos certis verbis quodam modo consecrantes Decii devoverunt, ut illis cadentibus et iram deorum sanguine suo placantibus Romanus liberaretur exercitus," and goes on to compare the Decii with Christian martyrs. I am indebted for this reference to Mayor's note on Cicero, de Nat. deor. ii. 3. 10.

See above, p. 176; Wissowa, R.K. p. 352, note 1.

By Deubner in Archiv, 1905, p. 69 foll. This touching of the chin seems to be an example of that personal contact which makes a man or thing holy; see, e.g., Westermarck, op. cit. i. 586. Decius makes himself holy for the sacrifice (as victim) by touching (as priest) the only part of his person which was exposed. For the magic touch of the hand see O. Weinrich, Antike Heiligungswuender, p. 63 foll., and Macrobius iii. 2. 7, for the touching of the altar by a sacrificing priest.

See above, p. 180.

This is Deubner's explanation, which he elaborates at length by examples of the worship of the spear or sword among various peoples.

This is peculiar to the formula in Livy viii. 9. Is it possible that it may have some reference to the fact that the Romans were fighting their own kin, the Latins?

Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 22 and 102: "hastatos inhastatos completo timore tremore, fuga formidine, nive nimbo, fragore furore, senio servitio," where, however, the translator from the Umbrian is assisted by the Latin formulae we are discussing.

Macrobius iii. 9. 10, "exercitum quem ego me sentio dicere fuga formidine terrore compleatis," etc. This is of comparatively late origin, as it is addressed to Dis pater, who only became a Roman deity in 249 B.C. (Wissowa, R.K. p. 257). The interesting feature in this devotio, used at the siege at Carthage, is that it is not himself whom the commander devotes—the common sense of the Romans had got beyond that—but the enemy as substitutes for himself. "Eos vicarios pro me fide magistratuque meo pro populo Romano exercitibus do devoveo, ut me meamque fidem imperiumque legiones exercitumque nostrum bene salvos siritis esse." Thus the enemy is made the victim, and this is why the only gods invoked are the Di Inferi, Dis pater, Veiovis, Manes, while in the older formula it is the gods of Romans and Latins. Pacuvius in a praetextata called Decius wrote: "Lue patrium hostili fusum sanguen sanguine" (Ribbeck, p. 280). This is the language Ennius used before him of the sacrifice of Iphigenia: "ut hostium eliciatur sanguis sanguine," where, however, the word eliciatur shows that it is magic. The curious thing in this last passage is that the parallel passage in the Euripidean Iph. in Aul. (1486) does not suggest magic. Is the idea Italian? The curse (for such it really is) is to be witnessed by Tellus and Iuppiter, and the celebrant points down and up respectively in invoking them, as also in the devotio of Curtis in the Forum (Livy vii. 6), which was an abnormal procuratio prodigii.

Cp. the language used by Livy of the second Decius (x. 29): "prae se agere formidinem ac fugam ... contacturum funebribus diris signa tela arma hostium." For spells or curses of this kind see Westermarck i. 563: a curse is conveyable by speech, especially if spoken by a magistrate or priest. "Among the Maoris the anathema of the priest is regarded as a thunderbolt that an enemy cannot escape." See also Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 434, for the Jewish ban, by which impious sinners, or enemies of the city and its God, were devoted to destruction. He remarks that the Hebrew verb to ban is sometimes rendered "consecrate": Micah iv. 13; Deut. xiii. 16; and Joshua vi. 26 (Jericho), which exactly answers to the consecratio of Carthage. For curses conveyable by sacrifices, as in all the cases I have mentioned, see Westermarck ii. 618 foll. 624, and the same author's paper on conditional curses in Morocco, in Anthropological Essays, addressed to E. B. Tylor, p. 360.

"Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices." I well remember hearing this read in church throughout the Crimean war.

"Pro republica Quiritium," in the formula quoted above.

Livy viii. 10 ad fin.

See above, note 28.

See Marquardt, p. 276 and notes; Mommsen, Strafrecht, 900 foll. The subject has generally been treated from the legal point of view rather than the religious; but from the religious point of view it has generally been assumed that the sacrifice was to appease the god. So no doubt it was; but I venture also to conjecture that the victim was vicarius for the contamination of the community. On the subject generally Westermarck's two chapters on human sacrifice and blood-revenge (xix. and xx. in vol. i.) are extremely well worth reading.

Aen. i. 607 foll. Cp. Aen. iii. 429—

praestat Trinacrii metas lustrare Pachyni cessantem, longos et circumflectere cursus,

where the slow movement and circuitous course of a lustratio must have been in Virgil's mind. The movement round an object for lustral purposes is seen in Aen. vi. 229, "idem ter socios pura circumtulit unda," where Servius explains circumtulit by purgavit. As early as Livius Andronicus (second century B.C.) we find "classem lustratur" of fishes swimming round a fleet (Ribb. Trag. Fragmenta, p. 1).

Marquardt, p. 324, for the februa of the Luperci, R.F. p. 320 foll., and the explanations there given. More will be found alluded to in Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 249. To my mind none are quite convincing. The Romans believed that blows with these februa (strips of the victim's skin) made women fertile; they were therefore clearly magical implements, but beyond this we do not seem to get. (See also Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 495 foll.)

Varro, L.L. vi. 13, "Februum Sabini purgamentum, et id in sacris nostris verbum." Cp. Varro, ap. Nonium, p. 114; Ovid, Fasti, ii. 19 foll., where he calls februa piamina, purgamenta, in the language of the ius divinum.

L.L. vi. 11.

Servius, ad Aen. x. 32; xi. 842; cp. i. 136.

See R.F. p. 127, for the same rite in the Church of England (Brand, Popular Antiquities, p. 292).

Les Rites de passage, ch. ii.

For boundary marks in historical times see Gromatici auctores, vol. ii. p. 250 foll. (Rudorff).

If the cattle were in the woodland beyond the settlement, as they would be in summer, they could not be protected in this way: like an army going into the country of hostes (see above, p. 216) they were treated in another way, which we may connect with the ritual of the Parilia, as Dr. Frazer has beautifully shown in his paper on St. George and the Parilia (Revue des etudes ethnographiques et sociologiques, 1908, p. 1 foll.).

Georg. i. 338 foll.

Varro, L.L. v. 143; Servius, Aen. v. 755 (from Cato); Plutarch, Romulus, xi.

See above, p. 117.

Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 12 foll. and 42 foll.

The deities of the city were invoked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops: a list in which the name is the only item that carries us back to pre-Christian times.

Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 21 and 84 foll.

Livy xl. 6 init.

See above, p. 96.

Numbers xxxi. 19.

Festus, p. 117.

See Huelsen-Jordan, Roem. Topographie, vol. iii. p. 495; Von Domaszewski, Abhandlungen, p. 217 foll.

Suggested by Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 28.

Livy iii. 28. 11.

Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 132 foll.

The account of lustratio given in this lecture is adapted from the author's chapter on the same subject in Anthropology and the Classics, Oxford University Press, 1908.

LECTURE X

THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF NEW CULTS IN ROME

I said in my first lecture that the whole story of Roman religious experience falls into two parts: first, that of the formularisation of rules and methods for getting effectively into right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe; secondly, that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of these, and of the engrafting on the State religion of Rome of an ever-increasing number of foreign rites and deities. The first of these stories has been occupying us so far, and before I leave it for what will be practically an introduction to succeeding lectures, it will be as well for me to sum up the results at which we have already arrived.

I began with what I called the protoplasm of religion, the primitive ideas and practices which form the psychological basis of the whole growth. The feeling of awe and anxiety about that which is mysterious and unknown, the feeling which the Romans called religio, seems to have manifested itself in Italy, as elsewhere, in those various ways which I discussed in my second and third lectures, in the various forms of magic, negative and positive. We find unmistakable evidence of the existence of those strict rules of conduct called taboos, which fetter the mind and body of primitive man, which probably arise from an ineffective desire to put himself in right relations with forces he does not understand, and which have their value as a social discipline. Again, we find surviving in historical Rome numerous forms of active or positive magic, by which it was thought possible to compel or overcome those powers, so as to use them for your own benefit and against your enemies. But I was careful to point out that on the whole little of all this evidence of the early existence of magic at Rome is to be found in the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat, well-defined growth.