The Religious Experience of the Roman People From the...

81 Westermarck, Origin etc. of Moral Ideas, ii. 584.

82 Jevons, Introduction, p. 33.

83 A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's Magic and Fetishism, in Messrs. Constable's series, Religions Ancient and Modern. See also Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, passim.

84Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text (devotio) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been originally practised by the Latin kings. I may here draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the modern French sociological school of research; e.g. M. Huvelin, in L'Année sociologique for 1907, begins by asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de l'activité collective" (Magie et droit individuel, p. 1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact that magic is both secret and private, not public and social, in historical times; and in the domain of law, with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that "a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from its proper social end, and employed to realise the will or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law, as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there are a few magical survivals which will be found mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of no importance for our present subject.

85Primitive Culture, vol. i. ch. iv. See also Jevons, Introduction, p. 36 foll.

86 See Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ (Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll.

87 Fowler, R.F. p. 232; Wissowa, R.K. p. 106. The most careful examination of the rite and the evidence for it is that of Aust in Mythological Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M.H. Morgan in vol. xxxii. of Transactions of the American Philological Association, p. 104.

88 Tertullian, de Jejun. 16. Petronius, Sat. 44, adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are "Jovem aquam exorabant."

89 This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert, Röm. Topographie, ii. 184.

90 p. 204 foll.

91 p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, R.K. p. 106, note 10.

92 See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 270 foll.

93 This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi. 14. 1.

94 See, e.g., Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 106.

95 Wissowa, l.c. Aust in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 657.

96 Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le paganisme romain, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my second course of lectures.

97 Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. ch. vii., especially p. 176 foll.

98 Cp. below, Lecture XV.

99 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 13: "Vestales nostras hodie credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere in loco precationibus."

100 Plutarch, Numa, 10. Virginity would increase the power of the spell; see Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, p. 54 foll.

101 See, e.g., Frazer, G.B. i. 360 foll.

102 See R.F. p. 320, notes 6 and 7.

103 Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia has been discussed (apart from writers on classical subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his Mythologische Studien, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 459; Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. ch. ii. R.F. p. 310 foll. See Appendix D.

104 This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to confute it in the Classical Review, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa replied in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 211 foll. Since then my conviction has become stronger that this great scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei as an institution of Numa, i.e. as primitive (frag. 121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, L.L. vii. 44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll.

105R.F. p. 111 foll.

106e.g. the October horse, which also occurred on the Ides; see R.F. p. 241 foll.; and the festival of Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), R.F. p. 50 foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the day in the first place. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 164 foll.; R.F. p. 241.

107 Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du système magique et les faits du système religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.

108e.g. Tylor, article "Magic" in Encycl. Brit., and Primitive Culture, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, Threshold of Religion, 83. See below, p. 180.

109 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 93 foll.

110 Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, note on this passage.

111Civ. Dei, viii. 19.

112 See, e.g., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.

113 The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.

114 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.

115 The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii.

116 Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.

117 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.

118Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.

119 See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll.

120 Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.