Such dedications were, however, common enough. When Epimenides freed Athens from pestilence he cleansed the city and set up a shrine to the Eumenides, and the people of Tanagra[53] similarly showed their gratitude to Hermes the Ram-bearer (Κριοφόρος) by entrusting to Calamis the erection of a statue in his honour.
Poussin painted a ‘Plague of Athens’, a much cherished picture now in the gallery of Sir Frederick Cook at Richmond. It is a dull wooden composition, and compares most unfavourably with his ‘[Plague of Ashdod]’, in spite of the close similarity of incident and episode that it depicts.
CHAPTER III
Unlike Greece, young Rome was subject to repeated pestilence: plagues punctuate the pages of her history. We shall see how deep an imprint they left on the nascent religion, literature, and art of Rome.
At first these plagues must needs have been endemic, and bred no doubt in the extensive swamps that lay within the city and around it for many miles, for Rome was not then a commercial city. Her corn she derived from Italy and Sicily, and held little or no intercourse with Egypt, until after the conquest of Carthage. Yet, in spite of the numerous records of her pestilences that have survived, there is not one the nature of which can be identified before the true Plague of Gregory the Great.
According to Plutarch[54] there was pestilence in Italy and Rome in the eighth year of Numa Pompilius (707 b.c.), forty-six years after the foundation of the city: the legend of it is full of interest. During its course a brazen buckler fell from heaven into the hands of Numa. Egeria and the Muses told him its meaning. It had been sent from heaven for the preservation of the city, and to prevent its theft eleven more were to be made so exactly like it, that no thief should be able to distinguish it from the rest. The immediate cessation of the pestilence seemed to verify this interpretation. One Veturius Mamurius successfully produced the eleven copies, and Numa gave charge of all the bucklers to the Salii, so-called from the dance they led up the streets, when, in the month of March, they carried the sacred bucklers through the city. ‘On that occasion’, says Plutarch, ‘they are habited in purple vests, girt with broad belts of brass: they wear also brazen helmets, and carry short swords, with which they strike upon the bucklers, and to those sounds they keep time with their feet. They move in an agreeable manner, performing certain involutions and evolutions in a quick measure, with vigour, agility, and ease.... The reward that Mamurius had for his art was, we are told, an ode, which the Salii sung in memory of him, along with the Pyrrhic dance. Some, however, say that it was not Veturius Mamurius, who was celebrated in that composition, but vetus memoria, the ancient remembrance of the thing.’ The legend affords unmistakable evidence of some expiatory ceremony, first introduced for relief of a definite plague, but subsequently, in view of the constant recurrence, performed twice a year. Plutarch omits one significant feature of the Salic ritual, the driving of a skin-clad man, called Mamurius Veturius (the old Mars), through the streets, while the Salii showered blows on him, and drove him out of the city. The examples in ancient folk-lore[55] of animal and human scapegoats, for the exorcising of pestilence are so numerous, that we may well seek the interpretation of this Salic ceremony in the persistence of this conception. The dancing, singing, and clashing of shields was perhaps intended to drive out the evil demon from the city as a preliminary to transferring it to the scapegoat Mamurius. At Tanagra, the youth who annually carried a ram on his shoulders round the walls of the city, did so as a representative of the Ram-bearing Hermes, who averted a plague in this same fashion.[56]
Plutarch discusses the meaning of these bucklers, called Ancilia, so it was said, from their curved form (ἀγκύλον). He suggests as alternative derivations, ἀνέκαθεν = from on high: or ἄκεσις = healing of sick: or αὐχμῶν λύσις = putting an end to drought: or ἀνάσχεσις = deliverance from calamities. But whatever the etymological significance, their ritual purpose would seem to have been to ward off the darts and arrows of pestilence, and the Salic ceremonial was dedicated to the honour of the sender. God he was not, for the religion of Numa’s Rome knew no gods of human form: these were a later importation from the anthropomorphic religion of Greece. He was some numen, some power less personal than a god, but more personal than a spirit. It was he that engendered pestilence by his evil machinations. The legend brings us back again close to the confines of imitative magic. True, it is not the agent of pestilence that is fashioned, not the brazen serpent, not the mice, not the emerods, but the agent of deliverance, ‘thy shield and buckler.’
In later years the Salii figure as colleges of priests, dedicated first to the worship of Mars, and later of Quirinus as well. The transformation served to obscure their true origin, which Plutarch asserts and which there is every reason to accept. Mars was not originally a god of war, but an agricultural god, and, like Apollo, a guardian of the crops. Coincidently with the transformation the ritual assumed a more martial character, the Salii performing the war-dance in full fighting panoply, as the procession moved through the city twice a year, in March and October. The beginning and end of the season of pestilence had faded insensibly into the beginning and end of the campaigning season. Horace[57] recounts the aldermanic magnificence of their festive repast.