That religion, as it comes upon us in the few glimpses we get of its early Italic and pre-Hellenised form, was one of the rudest and most primitive type, almost savage in its extreme simplicity. It knew hardly any great gods by name: the few deities it possessed, it expressed only for the most part by adjectival names. Few, I say, as to type, for as to number of individuals, their name indeed was legion; they pervaded the whole, world in that reckless multiplicity which distinguishes the simple ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral peoples. With the Romans, this multiplicity, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into a relatively settled and civilised agricultural condition. A vast number of small departmental gods, with few or no great ones—that is the first state of the Roman pantheon.
The central point of old Roman religion was clearly the household; the family ghosts or lares were the most honoured gods. We may instructively compare Mr. Chalmers’s account of the theology of New Guinea. Beside these ancestral shades, or almost identical with them, came the pénates or practical deities of the store-room, perhaps the representatives of the victims slain as foundation-ghosts at the first erection of the building. Of these two, the Lares were undoubtedly the departed ancestors of the family; they lived near the spot where they were first buried (for the old Romans were buriers), and they still presided over the household as in life, like its fathers and senators. They were worshipped daily with prayers and simple offerings of food and drink; their masks or busts which hung on the wall were perhaps the representatives, or in ancient days the coverings, of the old oracular heads or skulls; for the skulls themselves may have been preserved in wax, as so often elsewhere at an earlier period. * The Penates, which were worshipped with the Lares, seem to have stood for the family spirit in a more generalised way; they represent the continuity and persistence of its Fortune; and therefore, if we may trust the analogy of the Fortune of a town, they are probably the ghosts of the foundation or renewal victims. In judging of all this, we cannot attach too great importance to the analogy of Negritto and Polynesian customs.
* To this use of the oracular head I would venture also to
refer the common employment of small masks as amulets: an
employment which, as Bottiger rightly remarks, explains “the
vast number of such subjects met with in antique gems.”
Other deities are more public. But most of them seem to belong to the simplest and most immediately ghost-like stratum. They had to do with sowing, reaping, and vintage—in other words, were corn or wine gods. Or else they had to do with the navigable river, the Tiber, and the port of Ostia, which lay at its mouth—in other words, were spring and river gods. Or else they had to do with war and expeditions—in other words were slaughtered campaign gods of the Iphigenia pattern, Bellonas and battle-victims.
Among this dim crowd of elder manufactured deities, Saturnus, the sowing god, was most likely an annual corn-victim; his adjectival name by itself suggests that conclusion. Terminus, the boundary god, is already familiar to us. About these two at least we can hardly be mistaken. A red-haired man (as in Egypt) no doubt preceded as yearly corn-victim the red-haired puppies still slaughtered for the crops within the ken of Festus. Seia, Segetia, Tutilina, the successive corn-deities, we have already considered. They seem to equate with the successive maidens slain for the corn in other communities, and still commemorated in our midst by the corn-baby and the corn-wife. At each stage of age in the corn, a corresponding stage in the age of the human victim was considered desirable. But how reconcile this idea with the existence of numerous petty functional deities—gods of the door and the hinge?—with the Cunina who guards the child in the cradle, and the Statina who takes care of him when he begins to stand? I answer, all these are but adjectival gods, mere ghosts or spirits, unknown in themselves, but conceived as exercising this particular function. “The god that does so-and-so” is just a convenient expression, no more; it serves its purpose, and that was enough for the practical Roman. How readily they could put up with these rough-and-ready identifications we know in the case of Aius Locutius and of the Deus Rediculus.
Each Terminus and each Silvanus is thus the god or protecting ghost of each boundary stone or each sacred grove—not a proper name, but a class—not a particular god, but a kind of spirit. The generalised and abstract gods are later unifications of all the individuals included in each genus. The Janus, I take it, was at first the victim once sacrificed annually before each gate of the city, as he is sacrificed still on the west coast of Africa: as the god of opening, he was slaughtered at the opening of every new year; and the year conversely opened its course with the month sacred to the god of opening. Perhaps he was also slain as fortune at the beginning of each war. The Vesta is the hearth-goddess; and every house had its Vesta; perhaps originally a slaughtered hearth-victim. Every man had in like manner his Genius, an ancestral protecting spirit; the corresponding guardian of the woman was her Juno; they descend to Christianity, especially in its most distinctive Roman form, as the guardian angels. Mars was a corn-spirit; only later was he identified with the expeditionary god. His annual expulsion as the human scapegoat has already been considered. The Jupiter or Jovis was a multiple wine-god, doubtless in every case the annual victim slain, Dionysus-wise, for the benefit of the vineyard. Each village and each farm had once its Jovis, specially worshipped, and, I doubt not, originally slaughtered, at the broaching of the year’s first wine-cask in April. But his name shows that, as usual, he was also identified with that very ancient Sky-god who is common to all the Aryan race; the particular Jovis being probably sacrificed, himself to himself, before the old Sky-god’s altar, as elsewhere the Dionysus-victim at the shrine of Dionysus.
These identifications, I know, may sound fanciful to mere classical scholars, unacquainted with the recent advances in anthropology, and I would not have ventured to propound them at an earlier stage of our involved argument; but now that we have seen and learned to recognise the extraordinary similarity of all pantheons the whole world over, I think the exact way these deities fall into line with the wall-gods, gate-gods, corn-gods, wine-gods, boundary-gods, forest-gods, fountain-gods, and river-gods everywhere else must surely be allowed some little weight in analogically placing them.
The later Roman religion only widens, if at all, from within its own range, by the inclusion of larger and larger tribal elements. Thus the Deus Fidius, who presided over each separate alliance, I take to be the ghost of the victim slain to form a covenant; just as in Africa to this day, when two tribes have concluded a treaty of peace, they crucify a slave “to ratify the bargain.” The nature of such covenant victims has been well illustrated by Professor Robertson Smith, but the growth of the covenant-gods, who finally assumed very wide importance, is a subject which considerations of space prevent me from including in our present purview. The victim, at first no doubt human, became later a theanthropic animal; as did also the Jo vis-victim and the representatives of the other adjectival or departmental deities. The Roman Mars and the Sabine Ouirinus may readily have been amalgamated into a Mars Ouirinus, if we remember that Mars is probably a general name, and that any number of Martes may at any time have been sacrificed. The Jovis of the city of Rome thus comes at last to be the greatest and most powerful Jupiter of them all, and the representative of the Roman union. Under Hellenising influences, however, all these minor gods get elevated at last into generalised deities; and the animal victims offered to them become mere honorific or piacular sacrifices, hardly identified at all with the great images who receive them.
The Hellenising process went so far, indeed, at Rome that the old Roman religion grew completely obscured, and almost disappeared, save in its domestic character. In the home, the Lares still held the first rank. Elsewhere, Bacchus took the place of Liber, while the traits of Hermes were fastened on the adjectival Roman bargain-spirit Mercurius. Yet even so, the Roman retained his primitive belief in corn and wine gods, under the newer guises; his Ceres he saw as one with the Attic Demeter; his rural ceremonies still continued unchanged by the change of attributes that infected and transfigured the city temples. Moreover, the Romans, and later the cosmopolitan population of Rome, borrowed gods and goddesses freely from without in ever increasing numbers. In very early days, they borrowed from Etruria; later, they borrowed Apollo from Greece, and (by an etymological blunder) fixed upon their own Hercules the traits of Heracles. On the occasion of a plague, they publicly summoned Asclepios, the Greek leech-god, from Epidaurus; and at the very crisis of the life-and-death conflict with Hannibal, they fetched the sacred field-stone known as Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of Pessinus with strange compliance let their goddess go; and the whole orgiastic cult of Attis was thus transported entire to Italian soil. The rites of the great festival were carried on at Rome almost as they had been carried on before in Phrygia; so that an Asiatic worship of the most riotous type found a firm official footing in the centre of the empire. The priest, indeed, was still an Asiatic, or at least not a Roman; but the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy which followed on this adoption of a foreign god, must have greatly increased the prestige and reputation of the alien and orgiastic deity.
The luxurious Aphrodite of Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time with Cybele. Originally a Semitic goddess, she combined the Hellenic and oriental ideas, and was identified in Italy with the old Latin Venus.