Kal. Mai. (May 1.) F.
LAR[IBUS]. (VEN.) L——. (ESQ.)
This was the day on which, according to Ovid[[371]], an altar and ‘parva signa’ had been erected to the Lares praestites. They were originally of great antiquity, but had fallen into decay in Ovid’s time:
Bina gemellorum quaerebam signa deorum,
Viribus annosae facta caduca morae[[372]].
Ovid himself had apparently not seen the signa, though he looked for them; and no doubt he took from Varro the description he gives. They had the figure of a dog at their feet[[373]], and, according to Plutarch, were clothed in dogs’ skins. Both Ovid and Plutarch explained the dog as symbolizing their watch over the city; though Plutarch, following, as he says, certain Romans, preferred to think of them rather as evil demons searching out and punishing guilt like dogs. The mention of the skins is very curious, and we can hardly separate it from the numerous other instances in which the images of deities are known to have been clothed in the skins of victims sacrificed to them[[374]]. We may indeed fairly conclude that the Lares were chthonic deities, and as such were originally appeased, like Hekate in Greece[[375]], by the sacrifice of dogs. We have already had one example of the dog used as a victim[[376]]. Two others are mentioned by Plutarch[[377]]; in one case the deity was the obscure Genita Mana, and in the other the unknown god of the Lupercalia, both of which belong in all probability to the same stratum of Italian religious antiquity as the Lares. Whether we should go further, and infer from the use of the skins that the Lares were originally worshipped in the form of dogs[[378]], is a question I must leave undecided; the evidence is very scanty. There is no trace of any connexion with the dog in the cult of the Lares domestici[[379]], or Compitales.
This is also the traditional day of the dedication of a temple to the Bona Dea, on the slopes of the Aventine, under a big sacred rock. It is thus described by Ovid[[380]]:
Est moles nativa loco. Res nomina fecit:
Appellant Saxum. Pars bona montis ea est.
Huic Remus institerat frustra, quo tempore fratri
Prima Palatinae signa dedistis aves.
Templa Patres illic oculos exosa viriles
Leniter acclivi constituere iugo.
Dedicat haec veteris Clausorum nominis heres,
Virgineo nullum corpore passa virum.
Livia restituit, ne non imitata maritum
Esset et ex omni parte secuta virum.
The allusion to Remus fixes the site on the Aventine. The date is uncertain[[381]]; so too the alleged foundation by Claudia, which may be only a reflection from the story of the part played by a Claudia in the introduction of the Magna Mater Idaea to Rome[[382]]. The temple, as Ovid says, was restored by Livia, in accordance with the policy of her husband, also at an unknown date.
Of the cult belonging to this temple we have certain traces, which also help us to some vague conception of the nature of the deity. It should be observed that though in one essential particular, viz. the exclusion of men, this cult was similar to that of December, it must have been quite distinct from it, as the latter took place, not in a temple, but in the house of a magistrate cum imperio[[383]].
1. The temple was cared for, and the cult celebrated, by women only[[384]]. There was an old story that Hercules, when driving the cattle of Geryon, asked for water by the cave of Cacus of the women celebrating the festival of the goddess, and was refused, because the women’s festival was going on, and men were not allowed to use their drinking-vessels; and that this led to the corresponding exclusion of women from the worship of Hercules[[385]]. The myth obviously arose out of the practice. The exclusion of men points to the earth-nature of the Bona Dea; the same was the case in the worship of the Athenian Demeter Thesmophoros. The earth seems always to be spiritualized as feminine even among savage peoples[[386]], and the reason of the exclusion of men is not difficult to conjecture, just as the exclusion of women from the worship of Hercules is explained by the fact that Hercules represents the male principle in the ancient Roman religion[[387]].
2. Macrobius[[388]] tells us that wine could not be brought into the temple suo nomine, but only under the name of milk, and that the vase in which it was carried was called mellarium, i. e. a vase for honey. A legend grew up to account for the custom, to which we shall refer again, that Faunus had beaten his daughter Fauna (i. e. Bona Dea) with a rod of myrtle because she would not yield to his incestuous love or drink the wine he pressed on her[[389]]. This may indicate a survival from the time when the herdsman used no wine in sacred rites, but milk and honey only; Pliny tells us of such a time[[390]], and his evidence is confirmed by the poets. In any case milk would be the appropriate offering to the Earth-mother, and it is hard to see why it should have been changed to wine, unless it were that life in the city and Greek influence altered the character both of the Bona Dea and her worshippers. The really rustic deities had milk offered them, e. g. Silvanus, Pales, and Ceres. The general inference from this survival is that the Bona Dea was originally of the same nature with these deities, but lost her rusticity when she became part of an organized city worship.
3. Myrtle was not allowed in this temple; hence the myth that Faunus beat his daughter with a myrtle rod[[391]]. But could the exclusion of myrtle by itself have suggested the beating? Dr. Mannhardt answers in the negative, and conjectures that there must have been some kind of beating in the cult itself, which gave rise to the story[[392]]. Dr. Mannhardt never made a conjecture without a large collection of facts on which to base it; and here he depends upon a number of instances from Greece and Northern Europe, in which man or woman, or some object such as the image of a deity, is whipped with rods, nettles, strips of leather, &c., in order, as it would seem, to produce fertility and drive away hostile influences. We shall see the same peculiarity occurring at the Lupercalia in February[[393]], where its object and meaning are almost beyond doubt. Many of these practices occur, it is worth noting, on May-day. If the Bona Dea was a representative in any sense of the fertility of women, as well as of the fructifying powers of the earth—and the two ideas seem naturally to have run together in the primitive mind—we may provisionally accept Dr. Mannhardt’s ingenious suggestion. If it be objected that as myrtle was excluded from the cult it could not have been used therein for the purpose of whipping, the answer is simply that as being invested with some mysterious power it was tabooed from ordinary use, but, like certain kinds of victims, was introduced on special and momentous occasions.
4. The temple was a kind of herbarium in which herbs were kept with healing properties[[394]]. A group of interesting inscriptions shows that the Bona Dea did not confine her healing powers to cases of women, but cured the ailments of both sexes[[395]]. This attribute of the goddess is borne out by the presence of snakes in her temple, the usual symbol of the medicinal art, and at the same time appropriate to the Bona Dea as an Earth-goddess[[396]]. It is possible that this feature is a Greek importation; but on the whole I see no reason why the female ministrants of the temple should not have exercised such healing powers, or have sold or given herbs at request, even at a very early period. No doubt Greek medicinal learning became associated with it, but that the knowledge of simples was indigenous in Italy we have abundant proof[[397]]; and that it should have been connected with no cult of a deity until Aesculapius was introduced from Greece, is most improbable.
5. The sacrifice mentioned is that of a porca[[398]]. The pig is also the victim in the worship of Ceres, of Juno Lucina[[399]] (as alternative for a lamb), and as a piacular sacrifice in the ritual of the deity of the Fratres Arvales (Dea Dia); it seems in fact, as in Greece, to be appropriate to deities of the earth and of women. There is no reason to suppose that wherever it is found it had a Greek origin; even in the cult of Ceres, which, as we saw, became early overlaid with Greek practice[[400]], the pig may have been the victim before that change took place. But it is a singular fact that in the worship of the Bona Dea, either at the temple of the Aventine, or in the December rite—more probably perhaps in the latter—the victim was called by a name which looks suspiciously Greek, viz. Damium[[401]]. It seems that there was a deity Damia who was worshipped here and there in Greece, and also in Southern Italy, e. g. at Tarentum, where she had a festival called Dameia[[402]]. It looks as if this Greek deity had at one time migrated from Tarentum to Rome, and become engrafted upon the indigenous Bona Dea; for we are expressly told that Damia was identical with the Bona Dea, and that the priestess of the latter was called Damiatrix[[403]]. Much has been written about these very obscure names, without any very definite result; but it seems to be generally agreed that the form of the word damiatrix indicates a high antiquity for the Graecized form of the cult, and may indeed possibly suggest an Italian origin for the whole group of names. In this uncertainty conjectures are almost useless.
We have seen enough of the cult to gain some idea of the nature of this mysterious deity, whose real name was not known, even if she had one[[404]]. We need not identify her with Vesta, as some have done[[405]], nor with Juno Lucina, nor with any other female deity of the class to which she seems to have belonged. She must at one time have been, whatever she afterwards became, a protective deity of the female sex, the Earth-mother[[406]], a kindly and helpful, but shy and unknowable deity of fertility. The name Bona Dea is probably to be regarded as one indigitation of the Earth-spirit known by a variety of other names and appearing in a number of different phases. There is indeed a remarkable indefiniteness about the Italian female deities of this class; they never gained what we may call complete specific distinctness, but are rather half-formed species developed from a common type. They form, in fact, an excellent illustration of the nature of that earliest stratum of Roman religious belief which has been called pandaemonism—a belief in a world of spiritual powers not yet grown into the forms of individual deities, but ready at any moment, under influences either native or foreign, to take a more definite shape.