W. Warde Fowler

“ After this the Roman months cease to denote by their names those workings of nature on which the husbandman’s fortune for the year depends.
By a process of elimination we can make a guess at the kind of ideas which must have been associated with the month which the Romans called Martius, even before examining its rites in detail. It is the time when the spring, whose first breath has been felt in February, begins to show its power upon the land [61] . Some great numen is at work, quickening vegetation, and calling into life the powers of reproduction in man and the animals. ”

“ There are festivals in the calendar about which we really know nothing at all, and must frankly confess our ignorance; there are others about which we know just enough to be doubtful; others again, in interpreting which the Romans themselves plainly went astray, leaving us perhaps nothing but a baseless legend to aid us in guessing their original nature. It must be borne in mind that the Roman religion was in ruins when the Julian calendar was drawn up, and that the archaeological research which was brought to bear upon it by Varro and Verrius was not of a strictly scientific character. ”

“ Thus in the so-called period of Numa, the period of the earlier monarchy and the first organization of the city-state, the religious life of the community had become highly systematized in respect of the cult, of the priest in charge of it, and the ius which governed all the citizens in their relation to the world of divinities. Of any real change however in the character of these divinities, of any approach to polytheism in the way of an increased individuality of conception, of iconic representation, or definite temple-worship, the Calendar then drawn up supplies no certain evidence. ”

“ Now the ritual of the Lupercalia seems to suggest that our word ‘purification’ does not cover all the ground occupied by the ‘religio’ of that festival; nor does it precisely suit some of the other rites of February. We are indeed here on difficult and dangerous ground. Certainly we must not assume that there was any general lustration of the whole people, or any period corresponding in religious intent to the Christian Lent, which in time only is descended from the Roman February. Assuredly there were no such ideas as penitence or forgiveness of sins involved in the ritual of the month. ”

“ Still, when all is said, a student of the Roman religion should be grateful to Ovid; and when after the month of June we lose him as a companion, we may well feel that the subject not only loses with him what little literary interest it can boast of, but becomes for the most part a mere investigation of fossil rites, from which all life and meaning have departed for ever. ”

“ The pietas of Aeneas is a sense of duty towards god and man alike; to his father, his son, and his people, as well as to the will of the gods, and to that solemn mission which is at once the religion of his life and the key to the great Roman poem [1512] . This is indeed that same sense of duty and responsibility which governed every Roman in authority in the best days of the State, whether paterfamilias, patronus, priest, or magistrate, and which was the motive power in the working of a constitution which lasted for centuries 348though only resting on a basis of trust. ”

“ The Carmentes were in fact the Norns of Italy. Such a practical need as the desire to know your child’s fortunes would be quite in harmony with what we know of the old Italian character; and I think it far from impossible that Fortuna, as an oracular deity in Italy, may have been originally a conception of the same kind, perhaps not only a prophetess as regards the children, but also of the good luck of the mother in childbirth. Perhaps the most striking fact in her multifarious cults is the predominance in them of women as worshippers. ”

“ Who was Portunus, and why was his festival in August? Why was it at the Pons Aemilius, and where was that bridge? Can any connexion be found between this and the other August rites? These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily; the scraps of evidence are too few and too doubtful. We have here to do with another ancient deity, who survives in the calendars only, and in the solitary record that he had a special flamen. ”

“ Now surely in this motive of fear, thus remedied by exact ritual, we may trace a true civilizing element—the idea of Duty, Pietas, which as Cicero defined it, was ‘iustitia erga deos’: righteous dealing towards the gods, in expectation of righteous treatment on their part. And he would be a bold man who should assert that ‘iustitia erga deos’ had no effect in inducing the habit of ‘iustitia erga homines’: in other words that it could not react upon conduct. In the pietas of the one typical Roman in literature both these elements are equally present. ”

“ The steadily increasing tendency to organize, a tendency rooted in the very fibre of this people, is producing colleges of pontifices and augurs, to assist by associated effort in making sure of the laws of intercourse with the unseen world, and of the best methods of divining its will and intention. And lastly, not only have we found in the festivals traces of the growth and systematization of the life of the city, but in the great Latin festival we have also religious evidence of the early tendency of the cities of Latin blood to combine in some sort with each other. ”

“ The Lares Praestites, worshipped on May 1, are the guardian spirits of the whole community. The Regia, the dwelling of the king, is its political and religious centre, with its sacrarium of Mars, the peculiar deity of the stock, and with the house and hearth of Vesta close by, now grown to be the symbol of the State’s vitality. The Vestals and Flamines have become priests of special worships in an organized state, and at the head of all is the Rex, still specially concerned with the cult of Janus, but representing in his priestly capacity the whole community. ”

“ I am disposed to think that we must look on organized war-material as a development later than the primitive times to which Mannhardt would carry us back, a side of Roman life which only in course of time became highly specialized.
We must never forget that the oldest Roman calendar is the record of the life of an agricultural people. So much is clear on the face of it; and in some instances, as in the Ambarvalia, Vestalia, Consualia, and in the October rite we have been discussing, something of the original intent can be made out from researches into modern folk-lore or savage custom. ”

“ In the rite of the October horse we may see an agricultural harvest custom taking a new shape and meaning as the State grew to be accustomed to war, just as Mars, originally perhaps the protector of man, herds, and crops alike, becomes—it may be even before Greek influence is brought to bear upon him—the deity of warriors and war-horses, of the yearly renewed strength of a struggling community [1090] . ”

“ But the personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic ceremony, the representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a deity of vegetation, but also as a scape-goat [122] . His expulsion implies this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such, should be expelled the city. But it is otherwise if he is also a scape-goat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other lands. ”

“ There may, even at that early stage in Roman history, have been an influence at work on the Roman mind, coming from Etruria and Greece, where polytheism found its nourishment in works of art and mythological fancy. These are possibilities of which we must take account, but the Calendar has nothing positive to tell us of them.
It is when we advance to the later monarchy, which we may speak of without hesitation as an Etruscan dynasty, that we find a change beginning, both in the forms and objects of the cult, which marks an epoch in Roman religious history. ”

“ We here lose the company of Ovid, who might, in spite of his inevitable ignorance, have incidentally thrown some ray of light upon the darkness; but it is clear that even Varro and Verrius knew hardly anything of the almost obsolete festivals of this month. The Poplifugia, the Lucaria, the Neptunalia, and the Furrinalia, had all at one time been great festivals, for they are marked in large capitals in the ancient calendars; but they had no more meaning for the Roman of Varro’s time than the lesser saints’-days of our calendar have for the ordinary Englishman of to-day. ”

“ The images of the gods were decked out as for a feast, and the face of Jupiter painted red with minium, like that of the triumphator. Jupiter had a couch, and Juno and Minerva each a sella, and the meal went on in their presence [944] .
Now an investigator of the Roman religious system is here confronted with a difficult problem. Was this simply a Greek practice like that of the lectisternium, and one which began with the Etruscan dynasty and the foundation of the Capitoline temple with its triad of deities? ”

“ Before attempting to answer these questions, it will be as well to say a few words about the nature and probable origin of the worship of Vesta. Owing to the remarkable vitality and purity of this cult throughout the whole of Roman history, we do not meet here with those baffling obscurities which so often beset us in dealing with deities that had lost all life and shape when Roman scholars began to investigate them. And yet we know that we are here in the presence of rites and ideas of immemorial antiquity. ”

“ On the whole this temple and its cult seem a kind of anticipation of the great temple on the Capitol, in marking an advance in the progress of Rome from the narrow life of a small city-state to a position of influence in Western Italy. The advance of the Plebs, the emancipation of slaves, the new relations with Latin cities, and the introduction of Greek religious ideas are all reflected here. New threads are being woven into the tissue of Roman social and political life.
The close relation of Diana to human life is not very difficult to explain. ”

“ Herein we find expressed the conception of the unity and indivisibility of Nature; whose symbol is the most characteristic figure of the Italian religion, the double-headed Janus, the highest god, and the god of all things, all times, and all gods. He unites the dualistic opposites which complete the world—beginning and end, morning and evening, outgoing and ingoing. ”

“ The best authorities seem now agreed in regarding the word Liber (whatever be its etymology) as having something of the same meaning as genius, forming an adjective liberalis as genius forms genialis, and meaning a creative, productive spirit, full of blessing, and so generous, free, &c. [149] If this were so it would not be unnatural that the characteristics and rites of Dionysus should find here a stem on which to engraft themselves, or that Liber should become the object of obscene ceremonies which need not be detailed here, and also the god of the Italian vine-growers. ”

“ Here and there we find survivals of what we can only regard as the most primitive condition of human life in ancient Latium: that of men dwelling on forest-clad hill-tops, surrounded by a world of spirits, some of which have taken habitation in, or are in some sort represented by, objects such as trees, animals, or stones. Examples of such objects are the oak of Jupiter Feretrius, the sacred fig-tree of Rumina, the stone of Terminus with its buried sacrifice, and the wolf, the wood-pecker, and spear of Mars. ”

“ There are no festivals in any way connected with Mars from this day to the Roman new year, March 1. As Roscher has remarked, his activity, like that of Apollo, is all in the warm season—the season of vegetation and of arms. ”

“ But we know for certain that the ancient cult here suggests neither gorgeous ritual nor iconic usage. We see nothing but the unadorned practices of a simple cattle-breeding people.
Coming now once more to Rome itself, where of course we have fuller information, fragmentary though it be, we find sufficiently clear indications of an ancient cult of Jupiter showing characteristics of much the same kind as those we have already noticed as being genuine Italian. ”