Of anything which can be dignified with the name of literature we have scarcely a relic. What there is seems ludicrously rustic and uncouth. Consider, for an example, the ancient hymn of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars. There were twelve of them, all men of patrician family; they dressed in embroidered tunics, with the striped toga, a breastplate of bronze, a conical cap with a spike; they carried each a sacred shield, and as they made their annual processions through the city at the beginning of each campaigning year, they leaped into the air and thumped their shields with sticks; trumpeters preceded them, and they sang this ghostly chant:
ENOS LASES IVVATE (ter)
NEVE LVE RVE MARMAR SINS INCVRRERE IN PLEBES (ter)
SATVR FV FERE MARS. LIMEN SALI. STA. BERBER (ter)
SEMVNIS ALTERNEI ADVOCAPIT CONCTOS. (ter)
ENOS MARMOR IVVATO (ter)
TRIVMPE (quinquies)
which is probably to be translated:
Help us, O Lares (thrice)
And, O Mars, let not plague or ruin attack our people (thrice)
Be content, fierce Mars. Leap the threshold. Halt. Strike (thrice)
In alternate strain call upon all the heroes. (thrice)
Help us, Mars (thrice)
Leap (five times).
Early Religion
In our quest for the essential Roman we shall find nothing more illuminating than religion. With some people culture takes the place of religion, but it is far commoner to find religion taking the place of culture: it did so with the Hebrews, and it does so to a great extent among the English. The Romans were never a really religious people. Probably they lacked the imagination to be really devout. They had scarcely any native mythology. But they were ritualists and formalists to the heart’s core. If those Salii had jumped only four times at the word “Triumpe,” the whole value of the rite would have been lost: if no worse thing befell them they would have had to begin again from the beginning. Thus religion, always conservative, and generally the richest hunting-ground for the antiquarian in search of prehistoric history, is almost our only source of information as to the mind of the early Roman. Of course, Roman religion is so deeply overlaid with Greek mythology that it takes some digging to discover the real gods of old Rome. But that is being done by the patience and insight of such scholars as Mr. Warde Fowler and Dr. J. G. Frazer, so that we now have a good deal of information about the original Roman religion.
Mr. Warde Fowler makes two important conclusions about the early Romans from his study of the twofold character of Mars, who, in spite of the later primacy of Jupiter, is undoubtedly the true Roman male god: “(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race, and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours.” This was the Roman method of making agriculture pay. The spring of the year and the month which still bears the name of Mars was not only the season of returning life to nature, but it was also the time when the god and his worshippers buckled on their armour to seek fresh ploughlands, just as did the primitive Germans. It was Europe’s first method of extensive farming, and the habit clung to the Romans long after they had ceased to be farmers. In the spring it was time to look about you and consider where and with whom you should begin to fight this year.
Some of these old Roman festivals are worth a brief description, for they and they alone are the authentic history of the early Romans. For example, on the Ides of March the lower classes streamed out to the Campus Martius on the banks of the river and spent the day in rustic jollity with wine and song in honour of Anna Perenna—the recurring year. On another day there was a ceremony like that of the Hebrew scapegoat. Two dates in the calendar are marked for the king to dissolve the comitia. The assembly had to be summoned by the blast of special trumpets of peculiar un-Italian shape (some say Etruscan), and the trumpets had to be purified by a special service on the previous day. Although the Romans abolished their political kingship, religion required the retention of the title for numerous ceremonial purposes. Then there were the Parilia in honour of the old shepherd god Pales, when sheepfolds were garlanded with green, the sheep were purified at the dawn, and rustic sacrifices were paid to avert the wrath of the deity in case you had unwittingly disturbed one of the mysterious powers who dwell in the country—the nymphs and fauns of pool and spring and tree. There was a prayer to this effect of which Ovid has given us the substance, and “this prayer,” adds Mr. Warde Fowler, “must be said four times over, the shepherd looking to the east, and wetting his hands with the morning dew. The position, the holy water, and the prayer in its substance, though now addressed to the Virgin, have all descended to the Catholic shepherds of the Campagna.” There were other primitive agricultural deities, such as Robigus (the red rust on the corn), on whose festival you sacrificed red puppies; Terminus (the boundary god), to whom you slaughtered a sucking-pig on the boundary stone; or Ops Consiva, the deity who protected your buried store of corn. Such names and their attributes indicate a certain poverty of religious imagination. There were more abstract, or, rather, less tangible powers, such as Lares, the spirits of the dead ancestors who figured as guardian angels of the home; the Penates, the spirits who watched over the store-cupboard; the Genius, a man’s luck; the Manes, the kindly dead; or the Lemures, dangerous ghosts of the unburied. The house, like the fields, was full of unseen presences to be appeased with appropriate ritual, which had to be most punctiliously performed. Every year at the Lemuria the master of the house would rise at midnight and, with clean hands and bare feet, walk through the house, making a special sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts. He fills his mouth with black beans and spits them out as he goes, carefully keeping his eyes averted, and saying, “With these I redeem me and mine.” Nine times he speaks these words without looking round, and the ghosts come behind him unseen to gather up the beans. Then the father washes himself again, and clashes the pots together to frighten the spirits away. When he has repeated the words “Depart, ye kindly spirits of our ancestors” nine times, he looks round at last and the ceremony is complete.
The history of Rome, as Mr. Warde Fowler discerns it in religion, begins with an extremely simple rustic worship of natural forms, meteoric stones, sacred trees and animals such as the Mother Wolf or Mars’ woodpeckers; to this stage belong many of the curious spells and charms against ghosts. This sort of worship is not distinctively Roman, but common to the greater part of Central Europe. From these savage local cults we pass to the more centralised worship which belongs to the household, and that household an agricultural one. The father is the priest, and his principal deity is Janus, the god of the doorway; his sons are the subordinate flamines; and his daughters have special charge of Vesta, who presides over the family hearth-fire. Their agricultural activities are reflected in the more orderly rural ceremonies in honour of Saturn, Ops, and Vesta. Thirdly, we have a series of cults which indicate the beginnings of a community with the king for chief priest, supported by State Vestals and flamines. The Latin Festival marks the participation of Rome in the Latin League, whose presiding deity was Jupiter. In these three stages it is mainly an affair of formless powers or “numina,” deities very scantily realised, with little or no personality, scarcely to be termed anthropomorphic at all. Instead of temples there was nothing but altars, chapels, groves.
If we view these changes in the light of ethnology we shall probably agree that the first of them is the common ground of prehistoric Mediterranean worship. It is what we find in Crete at the earliest period. But we have come to regard the strict monogamous patriarchal family as especially the contribution of the north to the civilisation of Europe. Unfortunately those deities who are most certainly plebeian, such as Ceres, Flora, and Diana, do not seem to belong to the earlier strata of religion.