The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 7

[162] Marquardt, _Privatleben_, p. 172.

[163] The controversy about the Lar may be read in the _Archiv fur 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage in _R.F._ p. 294; it is still not clear to me whether Varro is identifying his Paganicae with the s.e.m.e.ntivae, 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.

[166] _Fasti_, i. 663.

[167] _Cl. Rev._, 1908, p. 36 foll.

[168] _Georg._ 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 pa.s.sage 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 Silva.n.u.s. Von Domaszewski, in his recently published _Abhandlungen zur rom.

Religion_, p. 61, discredits the pa.s.sage about the three Silvani, following a paper of Mommsen. But his whole interesting discussion of Silva.n.u.s shows well how many different forms that curious semi-deity could take.

[170] _Odes_, iii. 18.

[171] Cic. _de Inventione_, ii. 161.

[172] pp. 236-284.

[173] _R.F._ 325, condensed from Siculus Flaccus (_Gromatici_, i. 141).

[174] _Fasti_, 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 pa.s.sages. Pliny, _N.H._ x.x.xiii. 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 Ja.n.a.lis_. See also Festus, p. 289, and Serv. _ad Ecl._ viii. 29; Bucheler, _Umbrica_, p. 136.

[178] The details are fully set forth in Marquardt, _Rom. Privataltertumer_, 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 pa.s.sage 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 (p.u.b.erty) have recently been included by M.

van Gennep in what he calls _Rites de pa.s.sage_ (see his book with that t.i.tle, 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 a.s.suming 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 l.u.s.tricus_ (see De Marchi, p.

169, and Tertull. _de Idol._ 16) most probably, and p.u.b.erty (_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 l.u.s.tration, 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 a.s.sumed 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 p.u.b.erty"; 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 G.o.ds by sacrifice and prayer, except in _Aen._ iii. 63 foll. and v. 73 foll. In the first of these pa.s.sages 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 Wunsch). Cp. _R.F._, p. 110.

[184] Ov. _Fasti_, v. 421 foll.; _R.F._ p. 107.

LECTURE V

THE CALENDAR OF NUMA

The religion of the household had two main characteristics. First, it was a perfectly natural and organic growth, the result of the Roman farmer's effective desire to put himself and his in right relations with the spiritual powers at work for good or ill around him. His conception of these powers I shall deal with more fully in the next lecture; but I have said enough to prove that it was not a degrading one. The spirits of his house and his land and his own Genius were friendly powers, all of them of the greatest importance for his life and his work, and their claims were attended to with regularity and devotion. From Vesta and the Penates, the Lar, the Genius, the Manes, and the spirits of the doorway and the spring, there was nothing to fear if they were carefully propitiated; and as his daily life and comfort depended on this propitiation, they were really divine members of the _familia_, and might become, and perhaps did become, the objects of real affection as well as wors.h.i.+p. In this well-regulated practical life of the early agricultural settlers, with its careful attention to the claims of its divine protectors, we may perhaps see the germs of a real religious expression of human life.

Secondly, there was doubtless at the same time constant cause for anxiety. Beyond the house and the land there were unreclaimed spirits of the woodland which might force an entrance into the sacred limits of the house; the ghosts of the dead members were constantly wis.h.i.+ng to return; the crops might be attacked by strange diseases, by storms or drought, and man himself was liable to seasonal disease or sudden pestilence. The cattle and sheep might stray into the remote forest and become the prey of evil beasts, if not of evil spirits. How was the farmer to meet all these troubles, caused, as he supposed, by spirits whose ways he did not understand? How were they to be propitiated as they themselves would wish? How were the omens to be interpreted from which their will might be guessed? How were the proper times and seasons for each religious operation to be discovered? If my imagination is not at fault, I seem to see that the Latin farmer must have had to s.h.i.+ft for himself in most of his dealings with the supernatural powers about him; _religio_, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull _religio_ to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take place in early Roman history.

For we now have to leave the religion of the household, and to study that of the earliest form of the City-state. We have enjoyed a glint of light reflected from later times on the religion of the early Roman family, and are about to enjoy another glint--nay, a gleam of real light, and not merely a reflected one--which the earliest religious doc.u.ment we possess casts on the religion of the City-state of Rome.

Between the two there is a long period of almost complete darkness. We know hardly anything as yet, and it is not likely that we shall ever know anything definite, about the stages of development which must have been pa.s.sed before Rome became the so-called city of the Four Regions, when her history may be said really to begin. The pagus hardly helps us here; it was not an essential advance on the family, and its religion was comprehensive, not intensive. Each pagus, however, seems to have had within its bounds an _oppidum_, or stronghold on a hill; and such oppida were the seven _montes_ of early Rome, which, with the pagi belonging to them, survived in name to the end of the Republic, with some kind of a religious festival uniting them together, about which we have hardly any knowledge.[185] This looks like a stage in the process of change from farm to city, and it has generally been believed to mark one. Unfortunately nothing to our purpose can be founded on it. We must be content with the undoubted fact that about the eighth or seventh century B.C. the site of Rome was occupied and strengthened as a bulwark against the Etruscan people who were pressing down from the north upon the valley of the Tiber;[186] we may take it that the old central fortress of Latium, on the Alban hill, was not in the right position for defence, and that it was seen to be absolutely necessary to make a stronghold of the position offered by the hills which abut on the river twenty miles above its mouth--the only real position of defence for the Latin settlements in its rear. Here an _urbs_ was made with _murus_ and _pomoerium_, _i.e._ material and spiritual boundaries, taking in a s.p.a.ce sufficient to hold the threatened rural population with their flocks and herds, with the river in the front and a common citadel on the Capitoline hill, and including the Palatine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills, though the last named remained technically outside the pomoerium.[187]

It is to this city that our earliest religious doc.u.ment, the so-called Calendar of Numa, belongs. That calendar includes the cult of Quirinus on the hill which still bears his name, and that hill was an integral part of the city as just described. On the other hand, it tells us nothing of the great cult of the _trias_ on the Capitoline--Jupiter, Juno, Minerva--which by universal tradition was inst.i.tuted much later by the second Tarquinius, _i.e._ under an Etruscan dynasty; nor does Diana appear in it, the G.o.ddess who was brought from Latium and settled on the Aventine before the end of the kingly period. We have, then, a _terminus ex quo_ for the date of the calendar in the inclusion in the city of the Quirinal hill, and a _terminus ad quem_ in the foundation of the Diana temple on the Aventine.[188] We cannot date these events precisely; but it is sufficient for our purpose if it be taken as proved that the Fasti belong to the fully developed city, and yet were drawn up before that conquest by the Etruscans which we may regard as a certainty, and which is marked by the foundations of Etruscan masonry which served to support the great Capitoline temple. And this is also borne out by the undoubted fact that the calendar itself shows no trace of Etruscan influence. But I must now go on to explain exactly what this calendar is.

The _Fasti anni Romani_ exist chiefly on stone as inscriptions, and date from the Early Empire, between 31 B.C. and A.D. 51. They give us, in fact, the calendar as revised by Caesar; but no one now doubts that Mommsen was right in detecting in these inscriptions the skeleton of the original calendar which the Romans ascribed to Numa.[189] This is distinguished from later additions by the large capital letters in which it is written or inscribed in all the fragments we possess; it gives us the days of the month with their religious characteristics as affecting state business, the names of the religious festivals which concern the whole state, and the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month. Excluding these last, we have the names, in a shortened form, of forty-five festivals; and these festivals, thus placed by an absolutely certain record in their right place in each month and in the year, must be the foundation of all scientific study of the religious practice of the Roman state, taken together with certain additions in smaller capitals, and with such information about them as we can obtain from literary sources.[190]

The smaller capitals give us such entries as _feriae Iovi_, _feriae Saturno_, _i.e._ the name of a deity to whom a festival was sacred, the foundation days of temples, generally with the name of the deity in the dative and the position of the temple in the city, and certain _ludi_ and memorial days, which belong to a much later age than the original festivals. But the names of those which are inscribed in large letters bear witness beyond all question to their own antiquity; for among them there is not one which has anything to do, so far as we know, with a non-Roman deity, and we know that foreign deities began to arrive in Rome before the end of the kingly period. Here, then, we have genuine information about the oldest religious doings of the City-state, in what indeed is, as Mommsen said, the most ancient source of our knowledge about Roman antiquity generally.

The first point we notice in studying this calendar (putting aside for the present the question as to the agency by which it was drawn up) is this: it exactly reflects a transition from the life of a rural population engaged in agriculture, to the highly-organised political and military life of a City-state. In other words, the State, whose religious needs and experience it reflects, was one whose economic basis was agriculture, whose life included legal and political business, and whose activity in the season of arms was war.

This last characteristic is discernible chiefly, if not entirely, in the months of March and October; and the former of these bears the name of the great deity, who, whatever may have been his origin or the earliest conception of him, was throughout Roman history the G.o.d of war. All through March up to the 23rd the Salii, the warlike priests of Mars, were active, dancing and singing those hymns of which an obscure fragment has come down to us, and clas.h.i.+ng and brandis.h.i.+ng the sacred spears and s.h.i.+elds of the G.o.d (_ancilia_).[191] On the 19th these ancilia were l.u.s.trated--a process to which I shall recur in another lecture; and on the 23rd we find in the calendar the festival Tubil.u.s.trium, which suggests the l.u.s.tration of the trumpets of the host before it took the field. On the 14th of March,[192] and also on the 27th of February, we find Equirria in the calendar, which must be understood as l.u.s.trations of the horses of the host, accompanied with races. If we may take the ancilia as symbolising the arms of the host, we see in the festivals of this month a complete religious process preparing the material of war for the perils inevitably to be met with beyond the _ager Roma.n.u.s_, whether from human or spiritual enemies; and that the warriors themselves were subjected to a process of the same kind we know from the historical evidence of later times.[193] Now in October, when the season of arms was over, we find indications of a parallel process, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but without fully recognising its religious import.[194] It was not so much thanksgiving (_Dankfest_) after a campaign that was necessary on the return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and spiritual.[195] On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry ARMIl.u.s.tRIUM, which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these days of October, and on the day of the Armil.u.s.trium, as it would seem, put their s.h.i.+elds away (_condere_) in their _sacrarium_ until the March following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic copy of the procedure of war.[196] From these indications in the calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious calendar.

The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the division of the days of the year into two great groups, _dies fasti_ and _nefasti_: the former are those on which it is _fas_, _i.e._ religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on which it would be _nefas_ to do so, _i.e._ sacrilege, because they are given over to the G.o.ds. We need not, indeed, a.s.sume that these marks F and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations.

The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread superst.i.tion, and we do not need to have recourse to Pythagoras to explain it; in this rule, as in others, _e.g._ their taboo on eating beans, the Pythagoreans were only following a native prejudice of southern Italy. "The idea of luck in odd numbers," says Mr. Crooke,[197]

writing of the Hindus, "is universal." Thus the simpler odd numbers, three, five, seven, and nine, all recur constantly in folklore; and the result is visible in this calendar. Where a festival occupies more than one day in a month, there is an interval between the two of one or three days, making the whole number three or five. Thus Carmentalia occur on 11th and 15th January, and the Lemuria in May are on the 9th, 11th, and 13th; the Lucaria in July on 19th and 21st. In some months, too, _e.g._ August and December, perhaps also July and February, there seem to be traces of an arrangement by which festivals which probably had some connection with each other are thus arranged; _e.g._ in August six festivals, all concerned in some way with the fruits of the earth and the harvest, occur on the 17th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, and 27th. It has recently been suggested[198] that these are arranged round one central festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the Volca.n.a.lia in August, the Saturnalia in December. But the reasons von Domaszewski gives for the arrangement, and the further speculation that where it does not occur we may find traces of an older system, as yet unaffected by the so-called Pythagorean prejudice, do not seem to me satisfactory. We may be content with the general principle as I have stated it, and note that while religious duties _must_ be performed on days of odd number, civil duties were not so restricted: the days belonging to the G.o.ds, which were, so to speak, taboo days, were more important than those belonging to men. There are, as I have said, but two days marked in the large letters as festivals, which are on days of even number, 24th February and 14th March, the Regifugium and the second Equirria; and about these we know so little that it is almost useless to speculate as to the reason for their exception from the rule. Two others, 24th March and 24th May, were partly the property of the G.o.ds and partly of men, and are marked QRCF (_quando rex comitiavit fas_); but the sense in which they partially belonged to the G.o.ds is not the same as in the case of sacrificial festivals.

This calendar thus shows obvious signs of both military and political development; in other words, its witness to the religious experience of the Romans proves that they had successfully adjusted the forms and seasons of their wors.h.i.+p to the processes of government at home and of military service in the field. But the most conspicuous feature in it is the testimony it bears to the agricultural habits of the people--to the fact that agriculture and not trade, of which there is hardly a trace, was the economic basis of their life. At the time when it was drawn up, the Romans must have been able to subsist upon the _ager Roma.n.u.s_, though, as we shall see later on, it was probably not long before they began commercial relations with other peoples; for their food, which was almost entirely vegetarian, and their clothing, which was entirely of wool and leather,[199] they depended on their crops, flocks, and herds; and the perils to which these were liable remain for the State, as for the farming household, the main subject of the propitiation of the G.o.ds, the main object of their endeavours to keep themselves in right relation with the Power manifest in the universe.

We can trace the series of agricultural operations in the calendar without much difficulty all through the year. The Roman year, we must remember, began with March, and March, as we have seen, had under the military necessities of the State become peculiarly appropriated to the religious preparation of the burgher host for warlike activity. But the festivals of April, when crops were growing, cattle bringing forth young or seeking summer pasture, all have direct reference to the work of agriculture.[200] At the Fordicidia, on the 15th, pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth-G.o.ddess, and their unborn calves burnt, apparently with the object of procuring the fertility of the corn; and the Cerealia on the 19th, to judge by the name, must have had an object of the same kind, though the supersession of Ceres by the Greek Demeter had obscured this in historical times. The Parilia on the 19th, recently illuminated by Dr. Frazer,[201] was a l.u.s.tration of the cattle and sheep before they left their winter pasture to encounter the dangers of wilder hill or woodland, and may be compared with the l.u.s.tratio of the host before a campaign. On the 23rd the Vinalia tells its own tale, and shows that the cultivation of the vine was already a part of the agricultural work. On the 25th the spirit of the red mildew, Robigus, was the object of propitiation, at the time when the ear was beginning to be formed in the corn, and was particularly liable to attack from this pest.

The religious precautions thus taken in April were not renewed in May; but at the end of that month of ripening the whole of the _ager Roma.n.u.s_ was l.u.s.trated by the Fratres Arvales. This important rite, for some reason which we cannot be sure of, was a movable feast, left to the discretion of the brethren, and therefore does not appear in the calendar. In June the sacred character of the new crops, now approaching their harvest, becomes apparent; the _penus Vestae_, the symbolic receptacle of the grain-store of the State, after remaining open from the 7th to the 15th, was closed on that day for the rest of the year, after being carefully cleansed: the refuse was religiously deposited in a particular spot. Thus all was made ready for the reception of the new grain, which, as is now well known, has a sacred character among primitive peoples, and must be stored and eaten with precaution.[202]

This was the chief religious work of June; in July, the month when the harvest was actually going on, the festivals are too obscure to delay us; they seem to have some reference to water, rain, storms, but it is not clear to me whether the object was to avert stormy weather during the cutting of the crops, or, on the other hand, to avert a drought in the hottest time of the year. The true harvest festivals begin in August; the Consualia on 21st and Opiconsiva on 25th both seem to suggest the operation of storing up (_condere_) the grain, and between them we find the Volca.n.a.lia, of which the object was perhaps to propitiate the fire-spirit at a time when the heat of the sun might be dangerous to the freshly-gathered crops.

After the crops were once harvested, ploughing and sowing chiefly occupied the farming community until December; and as these operations were not accompanied by the same perils which beset the agriculturist in spring and summer, they have left no trace in the calendar. Special religious action was not necessary on their behalf. It is not till the autumn sowing was over, and the workers could rest from their labours, that we find another set of festivals, of which the centre-point is the Saturnalia on the 17th, Saturnus being the deity, I think, both of the operation of sowing and of the sown seed, now reposing in the bosom of mother earth.[203] A second Consualia on the 15th, and the Opalia on the 19th, like the corresponding August festivals, seem to be concerned with the housed grain harvested in the previous August; I am disposed to think that in all three we should see not only the natural rejoicing after the labours of the autumn, but the opening of the granaries and, perhaps, the first eating of the grain. For on the Saturnalia there was a sacrifice at Saturnus' altar, followed by a feast, which was afterwards Graecised, but doubtless originally represented the primitive feasting of the farm, in which the whole familia took part. This brings us practically to the end of the agricultural year as represented in the calendar; for spring sowing was exceptional, the joyful feasts of pagus and compitum are not to be found in our doc.u.ment, and the month of February is specially occupied with the care and cult of the dead (_Manes_).

At this point I wish to notice one or two results of the adoption of a religious calendar such as I have been describing, which are more to the purpose of these lectures than some of the details I have had to point out. First, let us remember that agricultural operations necessarily vary in date according to the season, and that most of the rural festivals of ancient Italy were not fixed to a particular day, but were _feriae conceptivae_, settled perhaps according to the decision of some meeting of heads of families or officers of a pagus. That this was so we may conjecture from the fact that those which survived into historical times, _e.g._ Compitalia and Paga.n.a.lia, and were celebrated in the city, though not as _sacra pro populo_,[204] were of varying date. But all the festivals of the calendar were necessarily fixed, and the days on which they were held were made over to the G.o.ds. Now by being thus fixed they would soon begin to get out of relation to agricultural life; just as, if the harvest festivals of our churches were fixed to one day throughout the country, the meaning of the religious service would sooner or later begin to lose something of its force. And how much the more would this be so if the calendar itself, from ignorance or mismanagement, began to get out of relation with the true season, as in course of time was frequently the case? When once under such circ.u.mstances the meaning of a religious rite is lost, where is its psychological efficacy? In the life of the old Latin farmer, as we saw, his religion was a reality, an organic growth, coincident at every point with the perils he encountered in his daily toil; here, in the City-state, it must from the beginning have had a tendency to become an unreality, and it ended by becoming one entirely. Some of the old rites may have attached new meanings to themselves; it is possible, for example, that beneath the military rites of March there was an original agricultural significance; the Saturnalia became a merry mid-winter festival for a town population. But a great number wholly lost meaning, and were so forgotten or neglected in course of time that even learned men like Varro do not seem to have been able to explain them. The only practical question about them for the later Romans was whether their days were _dies fasti_ or _nefasti_ or _comitiales_,--what work might or might not be done on them.

Another point, closely connected with the last, and tending in the same direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The value of such routine to an undisciplined people has been well pointed out by Bishop Stubbs, in writing of the effect of the rule of the Norman and Angevin kings on the English people,[205] where it was also a religious as well as a legal discipline that was at work. In neither case was it the ignorant and superst.i.tious routine of savage life, which of late years we have had to subst.i.tute for old fancies about the freedom of the savage; it is the willing obedience of civilised man for his own benefit. But if it means a routine of religious rites which are beginning to lose their meaning; if the relation between them and man's life and work is lost; and lastly, if, as was probably the case, the Fasti were not published, but remained in the hands of a priesthood or an aristocracy,[206]--then there is serious loss as well as gain. You begin sooner or later to cease to feel your dependence on the divine beings around you for your daily bread, to get out of right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe.