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

154Civ. Dei, vi. 9. These are deities of the Indigitamenta; see below, p. 84.

155 De Marchi, La Religione, etc. i. 188 foll.; Marquardt, Privatleben der Römer, p. 336, "la porte est la limite entre le monde étranger et le monde domestique" (A. van Gennep, Rites de passage, p. 26, where other illustrations are given).

156 See below, Lect. XII. p. 281.

157 Wissowa, R.K. p. 96; Aust, Rel. der Römer, p. 117; Roscher in Myth. Lex. s.v. "Janus"; J. B. Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 13. Cp. Von Domaszewski in Archiv, 1907, p. 337.

158 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, p. 286 foll.; A. B. Cook in Classical Review, 1904, p. 367 foll.

159Gromat. vet. i. 302, line 20 foll., describes the chapels, but without mentioning the Lares. Varro (L.L. vi. 25) supplies the name: "Compitalia dies attributus Laribus Compitalibus; ideo ubi viae competunt tum in competis sacrificatur." Cp. Wissowa, R.K. p. 148. But the nature of the land thus marked off is not clear to me, nor explained (for primitive times) by Wissowa in Real-Encycl., s.vv. "Compitum" and "Compitalia."

160 "Enos Lases juvate." See Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26 foll.

161 Cato, R.R. 5. Cp. Dion. Hal. iv. 13. 2. In Cato 143 the vilica is to put a wreath on the focus on Kalends, Nones and Ides, and to pray to the Lar familiaris pro copia (at the compita?).

162 Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 172.

163 The controversy about the Lar may be read in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 42 foll. (Wissowa), and 1907, p. 368 foll. (Samter in reply). De Marchi (La Religione, etc. i. 28 foll.) takes the same view as Samter, who originally stated it in his Familienfesten, p. 105 foll., in criticism of Wissowa's view. See also a note by the author in the Archiv, 1906, p. 529.

164 Wissowa, R.K. p. 148; the details as to the altar occur in Gromatici vet. i. 302. It was on this occasion that maniae and pilae were hung on the house and compitum ("pro foribus," Macr. i. 7. 35); see above, p. 61. For the religio Larium, Cic. de Legg., ii. 19 and 27. That the Compitalia was an old Latin festival is undoubted; but as we are uncertain about the exact nature of the earliest form of landholding, we cannot be sure about the nature of the compita in remote antiquity. The passage from the Gromatici (Dolabella), quoted above, refers to the fines templares of possessiones, i.e. the boundaries marked by these chapels in estates of later times. See Rudorff in vol. ii. p. 263; Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Compitum."

165 Varro, L.L. vi. 26. I have discussed this passage in R.F. p. 294; it is still not clear to me whether Varro is identifying his Paganicae with the Sementivae, but on the whole I think he uses the latter word of a city rite (dies a pontificibus dictus), and the former of the country festivals of the same kind.

166Fasti, i. 663.

167Cl. Rev., 1908, p. 36 foll.

168Georg. i. 338 foll.

169 See my discussion of Faunus in R.F. p. 258 foll. I am still unable to agree with Wissowa in his view of Faunus (R.K. p. 172 foll.). I may here mention a passage of the gromatic writer Dolabella (Gromatici, i. 302), in which he says that there were three Silvani to each possessio or large estate of later times: "S. domesticus, possessioni consecratus: alter agrestis, pastoribus consecratus: tertius orientalis, cui est in confinio lucus positus, a quo inter duo pluresque fines oriuntur." Faunus never became domesticated, but he belongs to the same type as Silvanus. Von Domaszewski, in his recently published Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion, p. 61, discredits the passage about the three Silvani, following a paper of Mommsen. But his whole interesting discussion of Silvanus shows well how many different forms that curious semi-deity could take.

170Odes, iii. 18.

171 Cic. de Inventione, ii. 161.

172 pp. 236-284.

173R.F. 325, condensed from Siculus Flaccus (Gromatici, i. 141).

174Fasti, ii. 641 foll.

175 See, e.g., Jevons, Introduction, etc., p. 138; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 321.

176 See, e.g., Tibullus ii. 1. 55; Virg. Ecl. vi. 22, x. 27, and Servius on both these passages. Pliny, N.H. xxxiii. 111; and cp. below, p. 177. For primitive ideas about the colour red see Jevons, Introd. pp. 67 and 138; Samter, Familienfeste, p. 47 foll. Cp. also the very interesting paper of von Duhn in Archiv, 1906, p. 1 foll., esp. p. 20: "Es soll eben wirklich pulsierendes kraftvolles Leben zum Ausdruck gebracht werden." His conclusions are based on the widespread custom of using red in funerals, coffins, and for colouring the dead man himself: the idea being to give him a chance of new life—which is what he wants—red standing for blood.

177 I am not sure that I am right in calling this whitethorn. For the qualities of the Spina alba see Ovid, Fasti, vi. 129 and 165, "Sic fatus spinam, quae tristes pellere posset A foribus nexas, haec erat alba, dedit." In line 165 he calls it Virga Janalis. See also Festus, p. 289, and Serv. ad Ecl. viii. 29; Bücheler, Umbrica, p. 136.

178 The details are fully set forth in Marquardt, Röm. Privataltertümer, p. 52 foll. The religious character of confarreatio and its antiquity are fully recognised by Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 427. Some interesting parallels to the smearing of the doorposts from modern Europe will be found collected in Samter, Familienfeste, p. 81 foll. The authority for the wolf's fat was Masurius Sabinus, quoted by Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 142 (cp. 157), who adds from the same author, "ideo novas nuptas illo perungere postes solitas, ne quid mali medicamenti inferretur." The real reason was, no doubt, that it was a charm against evil spirits, not against poison; but it is worth while to quote here another passage of Pliny (xx. 101), where he says that a squill hung in limine ianuae had the same power, according to Pythagoras. Some may see a reminiscence of totemism in the wolf's fat: in any case the mention of the animal as obtainable is interesting.

179 Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 6 foll. The idea is that the child comes from mother earth, and will eventually return to her.

180 For Roman names Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 7 foll., and Mommsen, Forschungen, i. I foll., are still the most complete authorities. For the importance of the name among wild and semi-civilised peoples, Frazer, G.B. i. 403 foll.; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 430 foll. All these ceremonies of birth, naming, and initiation (puberty) have recently been included by M. van Gennep in what he calls Rites de passage (see his book with that title, which appeared after these lectures were prepared, especially chapters v. and vi.). In all these ceremonies he traces more or less successfully a sequence of rites of separation (i.e. from a previous condition), of margin, where the ground is, so to speak, neutral, and of "aggregation," when the subject is introduced to a new state or condition of existence. If I understand him rightly, he looks on this as the proper and primitive explanation of all such rites, and denies that they need to be accounted for animistically, i.e. by assuming that riddance of evil spirits, or purification of any kind, is the leading idea in them. They are, in fact, quasi-dramatic celebrations of a process of going over from one status to another, and may be found in connection with all the experiences of man in a social state.

But the Roman society, of which I am describing the religious aspect, had beyond doubt reached the animistic stage of thought, and was in process of developing it into the theological stage; hence these ceremonies are marked by sacrifices, as marriage, the dies lustricus (see De Marchi, p. 169, and Tertull. de Idol. 16) most probably, and puberty (R.F. p. 56). I do not fully understand how far van Gennep considers sacrifice as marking a later stage in the development of the ideas of a society on these matters (see his note in criticism of Oldenburg, p. 78); but I see no good reason to abandon the words purification and lustration, believing that even if he is right in his explanation of the original performances, these ideas had been in course of time engrafted on them.

181 In historical times the toga pura was assumed when the parents thought fit; earlier there may have been a fixed day (R.F. p. 56, "Liberalia"). In any case there was, of course, no necessary correspondence between "social and physical puberty"; van Gennep, p. 93 foll.

182 Wissowa, R.K. p. 191; J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll.; Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 77. The whole question of the so-called cult of the dead at Rome calls for fresh investigation in the light of ethnological and archaeological research. The recent work of Mr. J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, seems to throw grave doubt on some of the most important conclusions of Rohde's Psyche, the work which most writers on the ideas of the Greeks and Romans have been content to follow. Mr. Lawson seems to me to have proved that the object of both burial and cremation (which in both peninsulas are found together) was to secure dissolution for the substance of the body, so that the soul might not be able to inhabit the body again, and the two together return to annoy the living (see especially chapters v. and vi.). But his answer to the inevitable question, why in that case sustenance should be offered to the dead at the grave, is less satisfactory (see pp. 531, 538), and I do not at present see how to co-ordinate it with Roman usage. But I find hardly a trace of the belief that the dead had to be placated like the gods by sacrifice and prayer, except in Aen. iii. 63 foll. and v. 73 foll. In the first of these passages Polydorus had not been properly buried, as Servius observes ad loc. to explain the nature of the offerings; the second presents far more difficulties than have as yet been fairly faced.

183 For recent researches about beans as tabooed by the Pythagoreans and believed to be the food of ghosts, see Gruppe, Mythologische Literatur, p. 370 (Samter and Wünsch). Cp. R.F., p. 110.

184 Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll.; R.F. p. 107.