Prid. Non. Iun. (June 4). C.
HERC[ULI] MAGN[O] CUSTO[DI]. (VEN.)
SACRUM HERCULI. (RUST.)
This temple also was near the Circus Flaminius[[542]]. It was a foundation of Sulla’s, 82 B.C., and the cult was Greek, answering to that of Ἡρακλῆς ἀλεξίκακος[[543]].
Non. Iun. (June 5). N.[[544]]
DIO FIDIO IN COLLE. (VEN.)
The temple on the Quirinal of which this was the dies natalis is said by Dionysius[[545]] to have been vowed by Tarquinius Superbus, and dedicated by Sp. Postumius in B.C. 466. But that there was a fanum or sacellum of this deity on or near the same site at a much earlier time is almost certain; such a sacellum ‘ad portam Sanqualem’ is mentioned, also by Dionysius[[546]], as ἱερὸν Διὸς Πιστίου, and we know that in many cases the final aedes or templum was a development from an uncovered altar or sacred place.
Dius Fidius, as the adjectival character of his name shows, was a genuine old Italian religious conception, but one that in historical times was buried almost out of sight. Among gods and heroes there has been a struggle for existence, as among animals and plants; with some peoples a struggle between indigenous and exotic deities, in which the latter usually win the day, and displace or modify the native species[[547]]. What laws, if any, govern this struggle for existence it is not possible to discern clearly; the result is doubtless the survival of the fittest, if by the fittest we understand those which flourish best under the existing conditions of society and thought; but it would hardly seem to be the survival of those which are most beneficial to the worshipping race. Among the Romans the fashionable exotic deities of the later Republic and Empire had no such ethical influence on the character of the people as those older ones of the type of Dius Fidius, who in historical times was known to the ordinary Roman only through the medium of an old-fashioned oath.
Ovid knows very little about Dius Fidius[[548]]:
Quaerebam Nonas Sanco Fidione referrem,
An tibi, Semo pater: cum mihi Sancus ait
‘Cuicunque ex illis dederis, ego munus habebo;
Nomina trina fero, sic voluere Cures.’
He finds three names for the deity, but two would have sufficed; the only individual Semo known to us is Sancus himself. The Semones, so far as we can guess, were spirits of the ‘pandaemonic’ age, nameless like the Lares with whom they are associated in the hymn of the Fratres Arvales[[549]]; but one only, Semo Sancus, seems to have taken a name and survived into a later age, and this one was identified with Dius Fidius. Aelius Stilo, the Varro of the seventh century A. U. C., seems to have started this identification[[550]]. Varro does not comment on it; but Verrius accepted it: he writes of an ‘aedes Sancus, qui deus Dius Fidius vocatur’[[551]]. The evidence of inscriptions is explicit for a later period; an altar, for example, found near the supposed site of his temple on the Quirinal, bears the inscription ‘Sanco Sancto Semon deo fidio sacrum’[[552]]. And there is nothing in the words Sancus and Fidius to forbid the identification, for both point to the same class of ideas—that of the bond which religious feeling places on men in their duties to, and contracts with, each other. They are in fact two different names for the same religious conception. It is interesting to find them both occurring in the great processional inscription of Iguvium in Umbria: Fisus or Fisovius Sancius, who is there invoked next after Jupiter, seems to unite the two deities in a single name[[553]]. This conjunction would seem to save us from the necessity of discussing the question whether Sancus, as has often been insisted on by scholars both ancient and modern[[554]], was really the Sabine form of Dius Fidius; for if in Umbria the two are found together, as at Rome, there is no reason why the same should not have been the case throughout central Italy. The question would never have been asked had the fluid nature of the earliest Italian deities and the adjectival character of their names been duly taken account of. We are all of us too apt to speak of this primitive spirit-world in terms of a later polytheistic theology, and to suppose that the doubling of a name implies some distinction of origin or race.
Dius Fidius, then, and Semo Sancus are both Latin names for the same religious conception, the impersonality of which caused it to lose vitality as new and anthropomorphic ideas of the divine came into vogue at Rome. But there is at least some probability that it survived in a fashion under the name of an intruder, Hercules; and the connexion with Hercules will show, what we might already have guessed, that the religious conception we are speaking of was very near akin to that of Jupiter himself.
There is clear evidence that the best Roman scholars identified not only Dius Fidius with Semo Sancus, but both of these with Hercules. Varro, in a passage already quoted, tells us that Stilo believed Dius Fidius to be the Sabine Sancus and the Greek Hercules; Verrius Flaccus, if his excerptors represent him rightly, in two separate glosses identified all these three[[555]].
Again, the Roman oaths me dius fidius and me hercule are synonymous; that the former was the older can hardly be doubted, and the latter must have come into vogue when the Greek oath by Heracles became familiar. Thus the origin of me hercule must be found in a union of the characteristics of Hercules with those of the native Dius Fidius. It is worth noting that in pronouncing both these oaths it was the custom to go out into the open air[[556]]. Here is a point at which both Hercules and Dius Fidius seem to come into line with Jupiter; for the most solemn oath of all was per Iovem (lapidem), also taken under the light of heaven[[557]], as was the case with the oath at the altar of Ζεὺς Ἑρκεῖος in Greece[[558]]. Yet another point of conjunction is the ara maxima at the entrance to the Circus Maximus, which was also a place where oaths were taken and treaties ratified[[559]]; this was the altar of Hercules Victor, to whom the tithes of spoil were offered; and this was also associated with the legend of Hercules and Cacus. In the deity by whom oaths were sworn, and in the deity of the tithes and the legend, it is now acknowledged on all hands that we should recognize a great Power whom we may call Dius Fidius, or Semo Sancus, or the Genius Iovius, or even Jupiter himself[[560]]. Tithes, oaths, and the myth of the struggle of light with darkness, cannot be associated with such a figure as the Hercules who came to Italy from Greece; tithes are the due of some great god, or lord of the land[[561]], oaths are taken in the presence of the god of heaven, and the great nature myth only descends by degrees to attach itself to semi-human figures.
We are here indeed in the presence of very ancient Italian religious ideas, which we can only very dimly apprehend, and for the explanation of which—so far as explanation is possible—there is not space in this work. But before we leave Dius Fidius, I will briefly indicate the evidence on which we may rest our belief (1) that as Semo Sancus, he is connected with Jupiter as the god of the heaven and thunder; and (2) that as Hercules he is closely related to the same god as seen in a different aspect.
1. In the Iguvian inscription referred to above Sancius in one place appears in conjunction with Iovius[[562]]; and, as we have seen, it is also found in the same ritual with Fisu or Fisovius. In this same passage of the inscription (which is a manual of ritual for the Fratres Attidii, an ancient religious brotherhood of Iguvium), the priest is directed to have in his hand an urfita (orbita), i. e. either disk or globe; and this urfita has been compared[[563]], not without reason, with the orbes mentioned by Livy[[564]] as having been made of brass after the capture of Privernum and placed in the temple of Semo Sancus. If we may safely believe that such symbols occur chiefly in the worship of deities of sun and heaven, as seems probable, we have here some evidence, however imperfect, for the common origin of Sancus and Jupiter.
Again, there was in Roman augural lore a bird called sanqualis avis, which can hardly be dissociated from the cult of Sancus; for there was also an ancient city gate, the porta Sanqualis, near the sacellum Sancus on the Quirinal[[565]]. Pliny’s language about this bird shows that this bit of ancient lore was almost lost in his time; but at the same time he makes it clear that it was believed to belong to the eagle family, which played such an important part in the science of augury. The only concrete fact that seems to be told us about this bird is that in B.C. 177 one struck with its beak a sacred stone at Crustumerium—a stone, it would seem, that had fallen from heaven, i. e. a thunder-stone or a meteorite[[566]].
Bearing this in mind, we are not surprised to find further traces of a connexion between Sancus and thunderbolts. There was at Rome a decuria of sacerdotes bidentales, in close association with the cult of Sancus. Three votive altars are extant, dedicated to the god by this decuria[[567]]; two of them were found on the Quirinal, close to the site of the sacellum Sancus. Now the meaning of the word bidental shows that the decuria had as its duty the care of the sacred spots which had been struck by thunderbolts; such a spot, which was also called puteal from its resemblance to a well fenced with a circular wall, bore the name bidental, presumably because two-year-old sheep (bidentes) were sacrificed there[[568]]. Consequently we again have Sancus brought into connexion with the augural lore of lightning, which made it a religious duty to bury the bolt, and fence off the spot from profane intrusion. Yet another step forward in this dim light. A bidental was one kind of templum, as we are expressly told[[569]]; and the temple of Sancus itself seems to have had this peculiarity. Varro says that its roof was perforatum, so that the sky might be seen through it[[570]]. In a fragment of augural lore, apparently genuine though preserved by a writer of late date, the caeli templum seems to have been conceived as a dome, or a ball (orbis) cut in half, with a hole in the top[[571]]. We may allow that we are here getting out of our depth; but the general result of what has been put forward is that Sancus = Dius Fidius was originally a spirit or numen of the heaven, and a wielder of the lightning, closely allied to the great Jupiter, whose cult, combined with that of Hercules, had almost obliterated him in historical times.
Finally, it would seem that those moral attributes of Jupiter which give him a unique position in the Roman theology as the god of truth, order, and concord, belonged at one period also to Sancus as Dius Fidius; for in his temple was kept the most ancient treaty of which the Romans knew, that said to have been made by Tarquinius Superbus with Gabii, which Dionysius must himself have seen[[572]], and which he describes as consisting of a wooden clypeus, bound with the hide of a sacrificed ox, and bearing ancient letters. Here also was the reputed statue of Gaia Caecilia or Tanaquil, the ideal Roman matron; of which it has been conjectured, rashly perhaps, but by an authority of weight, that it really represented a humanized female form of Dius Fidius, standing to him as the Junones of women stood to the Genii of men, or as Juno in the abstract to Genius in the abstract[[573]].
2. The last sentence of the preceding paragraph may aptly bring us to our second point, viz. the relation to Jupiter of Dius Fidius as = Hercules. Those who read the article ‘Dius Fidius’ in Roscher’s Lexicon will be struck by the fact that so cautious a writer as Professor Wissowa should boldly identify this deity, at the very outset of his account, with the ‘Genius Iovis’; and this conjecture, which is not his own, but rather that of the late Professor Reifferscheid of Breslau[[574]], calls for a word of explanation.
More than thirty years ago Reifferscheid published a paper in which he compared certain points in the cults of Juno and Hercules, of which we have a meagre knowledge from Roman literature, with some works of art of Etruscan or ancient Italian origin (i. e. not Greek), and found that they seemed to throw new and unexpected light on each other.
The Roman women, we are told[[575]], did not swear by Hercules, but by ‘their Juno’; the men swore by Hercules, Dius Fidius, or by their Genius[[576]]. Women were excluded from the cult of Hercules at the ara maxima[[577]]; men were excluded, not indeed from the cult of Juno, but (as Reifferscheid puts it) ‘from that of Bona Dea, who was not far removed from Juno[[578]].’ At the birth of a child, a couch (lectus) was spread in the atrium for Juno, a mensa for Hercules[[579]]. The bride’s girdle (cingulum) seems to have given rise to a cult-title of Juno, viz. Cinxia, while the knot in it which was loosed by the bridegroom at the lectus genialis was called the nodus herculaneus[[580]].
Now Reifferscheid believed that he found the same conjunction of Juno and Hercules in several works of art, which may be supposed to be reflections from the same set of ideas which produced the usages just indicated. In the most important of these there is indeed no doubt about it; this is a mirror of Etruscan workmanship[[581]], in which three figures are marked with the Latin names Iovei (Jupiter), Iuno and Hercele. Jupiter sits on an altar in the middle, and with his right hand is touching Juno, who has her left hand on his shoulder; Hercules stands with his club, apparently expectant, on the left. From certain indications in the mirror (for which I must refer the reader to the illustration on p. 2259 of Roscher’s Lexicon) Reifferscheid concluded that Jupiter was here giving Juno in marriage to Hercules; and, in spite of some criticism, this interpretation has been generally accepted[[582]]. In other works of art he found the same conjunction, though no names mark the figures; in these Hercules and Juno, if such they be, appear to be contending for the mastery, rather than uniting peacefully in wedlock[[583]]. This conjunction, or opposition, of Juno and Hercules, is thus explained by Reifferscheid. The name Juno represents the female principle in human nature[[584]]; the ‘genius’ of a woman was called by this name, and the cult of Juno as a developed goddess shows many features that bear out the proposition[[585]]. If these facts be so, then the inference to be drawn from the conjunction or opposition of Juno and Hercules is that the name Hercules indicates the male principle in human nature. But the male principle is also expressed in the word Genius, as we see e. g. in the term lectus genialis; Hercules therefore and Genius mean the same thing—the former name having encroached upon the domain of the latter, as a Latinized form of Heracles, of all Greek heroes or divinities the most virile. And if Hercules, Semo Sancus and Dius Fidius are all different names for the same idea, then the word Genius may be taken as equivalent to the two last of these as well as to Hercules[[586]].
But why does Reifferscheid go on to tell us that this Genius, i. e. Hercules = Sancus = Dius Fidius, is the Genius Iovis? How does he connect this many-titled conception with the great father of the sky? As a matter of fact, he has but slender evidence for this; he relies on the mirror in which he found Jupiter giving Juno to Hercules, and on the conjecture that the Greek Hercules, the son of Zeus, would easily come to occupy in Italy the position of Genius, if the latter were, in an abstract form and apart from individual human life, regarded as the Genius of Jupiter[[587]]. And in this he is followed by Wissowa and other writers in Roscher’s Lexicon.
It would perhaps have been wiser not to go so far as this. He has already carried us back to a world of ideas older than these varying names which so often bewilder us in the Roman worship—to a world of spirits, Semones, Lares, Cerri, ghosts of deceased ancestors, vegetation demons, and men’s ‘other souls.’ When he talks of a Genius Iovis[[588]], he is surely using the language of later polytheism to express an idea which belonged, not to a polytheistic age, but to that older world of religious thought. He is doing, in fact, the very thing which the Romans themselves were doing all through the period of the Republic—the one thing which above all others has made the study of their religious ideas such a treacherous quagmire for the modern student.