I said that human beings might be subjected to the lustral process en masse, as well as land and city. Before we return from Iguvium to Rome, I may mention that the Iguvian documents also contain instructions for the lustratio of the people.[125] So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the people was brought together in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round them a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer (the former not apparently with the usual suovetaurilia), and Mars and two female consorts or representatives of his power were entreated to confound and frighten certain enemies of the city, in language which reminds me of the prayer in time of war, now happily abandoned, which I can remember as a child being read in the days of the Crimean war—‘abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices’. Then followed of course a prayer for blessing on the Iguvini. This may conveniently bring us back to Rome; for in the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (iv. 22), we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host with sacrifice to Mars. This was no doubt really the early form of the census, which had a military meaning and origin.
The explanation of this lustration of the host, the male population in arms, of a community, is not quite the same as that of the rite as applied to a city; yet it takes us back to the same animistic period and the same class of ideas. These armies were likely to have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the ager Romanus, and therefore among spirits with whom the Romans or Iguvians, as the case might be, had no peaceful relations, and of whose ways and freaks they were in fact entirely ignorant. They must, therefore, be protected against such evil influences by some special device and ritual. Of this kind of practice Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in Golden Bough, i. 304 foll., both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. As we are dealing here with Rome only, we may content ourselves with a parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which, as it happens, Dr. Frazer has not mentioned. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring before a campaign between the severed limbs of a dog (xl. 6 init.). This only differs from the Italian plan in method, not in principle: the object in each case is to subject the whole army without exception to the salutary influence of the victim: but in Macedonia it is made to pass between the two parts of a slain victim, while in Italy the live victims are made to pass round the army, and afterwards sacrificed. That each Roman army was thus lustrated is almost certain (Dict. Ant., vol. ii. 102): in fact the word lustratio came to mean a review of troops for this reason, without religious signification: so at least we are used to take such expressions as Cicero uses of his army in Cilicia, ‘exercitum lustravi’ (Att. v. 20. 2). Even the fleets were subjected to the same process: and in Livy xxix. 27 we have a prayer addressed by Scipio to the deities of the sea before sailing for Africa, which may remind us of those used during the lustration of the people at Iguvium.
Further, at this same time, in spring, before the season of arms, all the appurtenances of the army were ‘purified’—the horses, the arms, and the trumpets. So at least we may gather from the fact that there was a festival in the oldest religious calendar at the end of February called Equirria, and another of the same name on March 14 following; though the real meaning of the word was lost in later times, this explanation is strongly suggested by the dates, and also by the place, i. e. the Campus Martius. (If this was flooded it took place on the Caelian hill.) The details of the festival, which must have included horse racing, are unfortunately lost. The Equirria of March 14 seems to correspond to a curious rite, of which the date is October 15, i.e. after the season of arms; on that day there was a two-horse chariot-race in the Campus Martius, and the near horse of the winning chariot was sacrificed to Mars, with peculiar ritual following the slaughter. It is tempting to refer this rite to a lustratio of the horses after their return from a campaign: but here again the details of a true lustratio are not forthcoming. It may have originally been, as Wissowa suggests, a cathartic rite purifying the army from the taint of bloodshed (cf. G. B. i. 332 foll.); the blood of the sacrificed horse was allowed to drip upon the sacred hearth of the Regia, and it is probable that it was used in the making of certain sacred cakes (mola salsa) of great cathartic value. But it is remarkable that this rite was not included in the festivals of the ancient calendar: we know of it only from other sources. I am inclined to hazard a guess that it belonged to a type of ceremony which the earliest pontifical legislators were unwilling to recognize; their efforts, as it seems to me, must have been directed to make the worship of the people as pure and orderly as possible.[126]
The old calendar also supplies strong evidence that the arms and the trumpets of the host were lustrated, both before and after a campaign. On March 19, called Quinquatrus, because it was the fifth day after the Ides, the ancilia, or shields of the war-priests of Mars, were thus purified; and it is a good guess that they stood for the arms of the fighting men generally. For on October 19 we find the festival Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. On that day it seems clear that both arma and ancilia were lustrated, and that the Salii for this purpose went round the armed host in a place called by the same name as the rite, in or near the Circus maximus (Varro, L.L. 6. 22: cf. 5. 153). Again, we have March 23 marked in the calendar as Tubilustrium; and though the old explanations confine these tubae to such as were used in sacris, I believe, with Wissowa, that included in these were the trumpets of the host.[127]
Lastly, we may believe that the army was purified from the taint of bloodshed after its return from a campaign, just as the Hebrew warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp after a battle (Num. xxi. 19). I have just now suggested that the sacrifice of the October horse may have originally had this object. But in Roman pontifical law the idea of the taint of bloodshed is only faintly discernible, as is also the case in the Homeric poems (Farnell, Evolution, p. 133); and the only distinct trace of it that I can find in regard to the army is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general’s car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ‘ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem’ (Fest. 117). Laurel was a powerful purgative of such taint.
I have now given some brief account of the most remarkable examples of the characteristic type of lustration in Italy, and more especially at Rome; and it only remains for me to sum up in outline what I have been saying. We began with the ideas of purification which were common to the Italians and other primitive peoples, and which have left traces here and there in the public and private ritual of the Romans, but without showing any great vital force, such as might enable them to develop into matters of religious or ethical importance in Roman life. We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice. Then we saw how this same practice was retained in the service of the State, and applied to the foundation of a city, to its land, to the circuit of its walls, to its people in the form of the men capable of carrying arms, to the horses, the arms, and the trumpets of this host.
In conclusion, I must ask the question whether this impressive ritual of lustratio ever came to have any religious or moral import for the Roman people. Undoubtedly the idea which lay at the root of it, the protection of the city and its inhabitants from hostile spirits or strange gods, disappeared from the Roman mind at an early period among the governing and better educated classes. In one point only, so far as I know, can we detect a survival of it,—namely, in the persistence of the pontifices in refusing to admit new gods within the sacred circle of the pomerium; they might be taken into the Society of Roman deities, but they must be settled in temples placed outside that boundary line. But as early as the second Punic war this old rule began to be broken, and in 205 b.c. even the mystic stone of the Magna Mater of the Phrygians was brought within the pomerium and settled in the heart of the city on the Palatine. And from that time onwards, whatever may have been the notions about such things of the ignorant Latin population, the old ideas assuredly vanished utterly from the minds of those who were in charge of the State and its religion.
Was there any transmutation of those ideas into religious beliefs which might help State or individual in the changes and chances of this mortal life? The answer to this question is a most emphatic negative. What spiritual help they needed they sought and obtained in new and foreign rites; their own solemn processions were sights to see and nothing more. Lustratio never really, in pagan Italy, developed an ethical meaning, as catharsis did to some extent in Greece.[128] And the explanation of this is a simple one; at a very early stage the State overpowered the individual, and the State religion obliterated all the germs of an individual religious conscience. Even in the cult of Jupiter, where, if anywhere, we might look for an ethical significance, this was so; ‘we do not pray to Jupiter,’ says Cicero, ‘to make us good, but to give us material benefits.’[129]
But, meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire. Then the Roman Church, with characteristic adroitness, adapted them to its own ritual, and gave them a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania major in Rogation week, not only beating the bounds as we still do in Oxford on Ascension Day, but begging a blessing on the crops and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.