The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic An...

No picture could be choicer or neater than this; for once it is a treat to have our best evidence in the form of a perfect work of art. We are for a moment let into the heart and mind of ancient Italy, as they showed themselves on a winter holiday. There is an ancient altar—not a temple—to a supernatural being who is not yet fully god, who can play pranks like the ‘Brownies’ and do harm, but is capable of doing good if duly propitiated. On the Nones of December, possibly of other months too[1119], he is coaxed with tender kid, libations of wine, and incense[1120]; the little rural community of farmers (pagus), with their labourers, take part in the rite, and bring their cattle into the common pasture, plough-oxen and all. Then, after the sacrifice, they dance in triple measure, like the Salii in March.

Horace is of course describing a rite which was entirely rural, as the word pagus would indicate sufficiently, apart from other features. Unless he were the god of the Lupercalia, which is open to much doubt[1121], Faunus was not introduced into the city of Rome till 196 B.C., when the aediles very appropriately built him a temple in the Tiber-island with money taken as fines from defaulting pecuarii[1122], or holders of public land used for cattle-runs. We may assume that his settlement in the city was suggested by the pontifices, and that we have here a case of the transformation of a purely rustic cult into an urban one by priestly manipulation. It is not impossible that the idea that Faunus was the deity of the Lupercalia came in about the same time[1123]. Both priests and annalists got hold of him, and did their best to rob him of his true character as an intelligible and useful god of woodland and pasture. He became a Rex Aboriginum[1124], and the third on the list of mythical kings of Latium[1125]. He became identified with the Greek Pan. But, in spite of all their efforts, Faunus would not tamely accept his new position. We hear no more of the aedes in the island: the Roman vulgus do not seem to have recognized him at the Lupercalia, and his insertion in the legends had no political effect.

The fact that not a single inscription from Rome or its vicinity records his name shows plainly that he never took the popular fancy as a deity with city functions: and the absence of inscriptions in the country districts also, in most singular contrast to the ubiquitous stone records of Silvanus-worship, seems to show that he remained always much as wild as he was before the age of inscriptions began, while the kindred deity was adopted into the organized life and culture of the Italian and provincial farmer[1126].

It may be as well, before leaving the subject of this singular being, to sum up under a very few heads what is really known about him. But so little is known about the cult of Faunus—and indeed it can hardly be said that any elaborate cult ever grew up around him—that it may be legitimate for once first to glance at the etymological explanations of his name which have been suggested by scholars.

(1) Faunus is connected with favere, and means ‘the kind or propitious one,’ like Faustus and Faustulus, and as some think, Favonius[1127] and Fons. This derivation was known to Servius[1128]: ‘quidam Faunos putant dictos ab eo quod frugibus faveant.’ It is not in itself inconsistent with what we know of the rural Faunus, or with analogous supernatural beings, like the ‘good people.’ It was accepted by Preller and Schwegler, and has affected their conclusions about Faunus; e. g. Schwegler based on it the view, now generally held, that Evander is a Greek translation of Faunus[1129].

(2) Faunus is from fari, i. e. the speaker, or foreteller. This too was known to Latin scholars: thus Isidorus (perhaps from Varro[1130]), ‘fauni a fando, ἀπὸ τὴς φωνῆς dicti, quod voce non signis ostendere viderentur futura.’ It was revived not long ago by the late Prof. Nettleship: ‘Once imagine Faunus as a “speaker,” and all becomes clear. He is not only the composer and reciter of verses[1131], but generally the seer or wise man, whose superior knowledge entitles him to the admiration and dread of the country folk who consult him. But as his real nature and functions are superseded, his character is misconceived: he becomes a divinity, the earliest king of Latium, the god of prophecy, the god of agriculture.’ We may compare with this Scaliger’s note on Varro, L. L. 7. 36: ‘The Fauni were a class of men who exercised, at a very remote period, the same functions which belonged to the Magi in Persia, and to the Bards in Gaul.’

(3) Faunus may = Favonius, which itself may come from the same root as Pan (i. e. pu = purify). Thus Faunus, like Pan, might be taken as a mythological expression of the ‘purifying breeze,’ the god of the gentler winds[1132]. The characteristics of Faunus are of course very like those of Pan; but as it is no easy matter to determine how far those of the Italian were taken over by the Roman litterati from the Greek deity, and as the etymology itself is confessedly a questionable one, this conjecture must be left to take its chance.

Servius has an interesting note on these lines: why, he asks, does the poet put Faunus in the plural, when there is but one? We might be tempted to think Virgil wrong and his commentator right, the poet representing Greek ideas and the scholar Italian, but for a still more curious note of Probus on the same passage: ‘Plures (Fauni) existimantur esse etiam praesentes: idcirco rusticis persuasum est incolentibus eam partem Italiae quae suburbana est, saepe eos in agris conspici.’ My belief is that these words give us the genuine idea of Faunus in the rustic mind, surviving in central Italy long after he had been appropriated as a conventional Roman deity. We seem in the case of Faunus to be able to catch a deity in the process of manufacture—of elevation from a lower, multiplex, daemonistic form, to a higher and more uniform and more rigid one. Yet so excellent a scholar as Wissowa holds exactly the opposite view, that there was but one Faunus, and that his multiplication is simply the result of Roman acquaintance with Pan and the Satyrs[1135]. It would have been more satisfactory if he had given us an explanation from his point of view of the passage of Probus just quoted, or had shown us how these Greek notions could have penetrated into the rural parts of Italy.

(2) Another point which comes out distinctly—unless our Roman authorities were wholly misled—is the woodland character of the Fauni. A passage of Varro, of which I quoted the first words just now, goes on thus: ‘hos versibus quos vocant Saturnios in silvestribus locis traditum est solitos fari futura, a quo fando Faunos dictos.’ This seems to be a genuine Italian tradition. Virgil was not talking Greek when he wrote[1136]

The poet imagines an ancient race, sprung from the trees themselves: a ‘genus indocile et dispersum montibus altis,’ living on the forest-clad hills[1137], to whom foreign invaders brought the means of civilization. Why should not this tradition be a native one? It is singularly in accord with the most recent results of Italian excavation; for it is now absolutely certain that the oldest inhabitants of central Italy dwelt on the hill-tops, and that the first traces of foreign influence only occur in lower and later settlements[1138]. The valleys were still undrained and malarious. These earliest inhabitants who have left their traces for the excavator, or a still older race scattered on the hills after their invasion, may have been the traditional representatives of what Preller has called ‘the period of Faunus[1139],’ regarded by the later civilization, from their wild and woodland habits, as half demons and half men. The name of the kindred Silvanus tells its own tale; and his actual connexion with trees was even closer than that of Faunus[1140].

(3) A third well-attested point is the attribution to Faunus or the Fauni of power for good or evil over the crops and herds, as we have seen it already implied in Horace’s ode. Porphyrion[1141] in his commentary on this ode tells us that Faunus, on the Nones of December, wishes the cattle, which are under his protection, to be free from danger. Just before this passage he had spoken of him as ‘deum inferum et pestilentem,’ thus giving us the dark and hurtful side of his power as well as the bright and gracious. The same combination of the powers of doing and averting harm is seen in Mars, as we have already learnt from the hymn of the Arval Brethren and the formula of prayers preserved by Cato[1142].

Under this head may be mentioned the belief that both Faunus and Silvanus were dangerous for women, an idea which finds expression in the significant word incubus, so often applied to them[1143]. We may perhaps find a reason for the identification of Faunus as god of the Lupercalia in the most striking feature of the festival—the pursuit of the women by the creppi, who struck them with thongs in order to render them productive[1144].

(4) The last characteristic of the Fauni to be noticed is that they had the power of foretelling the future. The verse of Ennius already quoted is the earliest literary evidence we have of this; but the quaint story of the capture of Picus and Faunus by Numa[1145], who caught them by making them drunk with wine at the fountain where they came to drink, and compelled them as the price of their liberty to reveal the art of staying a disaster, has an unmistakeable old-Italian ring. The idea seems to have been, not that Faunus was a ‘god of prophecy,’ as Preller seems to fancy, but that there was an ancient race of Fauni, who might be coaxed or compelled to reveal secrets. Sometimes indeed they ‘spoke’ of their own accord; when a Roman army needed to be warned or encouraged on its march, their voice was heard by all as it issued from thicket or forest. Cicero and Livy[1146] write of these voices with a distinctness which (as it seems to me) admits of no suspicion that they are inserting Greek ideas into Roman annals.

There are also traces to be found of a belief in the existence of local woodland oracles of Faunus and his kind. It was in a grove sacred to Faunus that Numa, in Ovid’s vivid description[1147], slew two sheep, the one to Faunus, the other to Sleep, and after twice sprinkling water on his head, and twice wreathing it with beech-leaves, stretched himself on the fleeces to receive the prophetic inspiration as he slumbered. Almost every touch in this story seems to me to be genuine; and especially the conditions necessary to success—the continence of the devotee, and the removal of the metal ring from the finger. Virgil, with something more of foreign adornment, tells in exquisite verse what is really the same story as Ovid’s[1148]. And a later poet writes of a sacred beech-grove, where under like conditions of temperance, &c., the shepherds might find the oracles of Faunus inscribed on the bark of a beech-tree[1149]. All this reminds us of Dodona and the oldest Greek oracles: we have here the quaint methods of primitive shepherds, appealing to prophetic powers localized in particular woodland spots. Roman exigencies of state drew by degrees the whole of the secrets of fore-knowledge into the hands of a priestly aristocracy, with its fixed doctrine and methods of divination; but the country folk long retained their faith in the existence of an ancient race, possessed of prophetic power, which haunted forest and mountain.