The hymn of the Salii was written in archaic Saturnian verse, fragments of which have come down to us. Quintilian[58] says that, by the first century b.c. the primitive language, passed down with verbal exactitude from generation to generation, had become unintelligible to those who ceremoniously recited it. One fragment is instructive in its significance:
Cumé tonas, Leucésie, prae tet tremonti, Quom tibei cunei dextumúm tonárent.
(‘When thou thunderest, thou god of Light, they tremble at thy presence, when the lightning shafts have thundered from thy right hand.’) These lines recall the figure of Apollo the Far-Darter in the Iliad, and his invocation in the Oedipus Tyrannus.
Pestilence was in Rome again just before the death of Tullus Hostilius[59] in 640 b.c. Tullus himself fell ill, and in his illness revived every superstitious usage, though when in health he had affected to scorn religion. The people also cherished the conviction that only by obtaining pardon of the gods would they be rid of the pestilence. So Tullus consulted the commentaries of Numa, and finding that certain sacrifices should have been paid to Jupiter Elicius (elicere = to elicit information), he set about their performance. But as he failed to conduct them in due form, he not only failed of his purpose, but so roused the anger of Jupiter, that he struck him with lightning and reduced him and his whole household to ashes. Livy’s story of Tullus illustrates well the relation of a Roman to his god: it was a practical, not a spiritual relation, a bargain, not an act of grace. If the Roman paid all his dues of worship to the god he had a claim to repayment in full. Again and again, under the stress of pestilence, failure of the god to honour his bond drove the Roman to try his luck with alien gods. This is the spirit in which Tarquinius Superbus,[60] during another plague, in 514 b.c., sent his sons to Greek Delphi to inquire of the god how to be rid of it. Pestilence, in this manner, was destined to forge many a link in the chain that bound Rome to Greece.
In the fifth century b.c., Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a constant succession of plagues in Rome. Eight visitations, at least, are mentioned, and as some of these lingered over several years, Rome, in the fifth century, can seldom have been free from pestilence. And yet all this time she was not only growing, but actually sending out colonies.
Of a plague in 473 b.c. we have an interesting recital by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.[61] ‘In the beginning of the year’, he writes, ‘many prodigies and omens happened, which filled the city with superstition and fear of the gods: and all the augurs and the interpreters of holy things declared that these were signs of divine anger, because some rites had not been performed with sanctity and purity. Not long after, a distemper, supposed to be pestilential, attacked the women, particularly such as were with child, and more of them died than had ever been known before. For as they miscarried and brought forth dead children, they died together with their infants. And neither supplications at the statues and altars of the gods, nor expiatory sacrifices performed on behalf of the public and of private families gave the women any relief.’ Thereupon a slave came forward and denounced Urbinia, one of the Vestal Virgins, who tended the perpetual fire, for impurity. The pontiffs at once removed her from her ministry, brought her to trial, convicted her, and condemned her ‘to be whipped with rods, to be carried through the city, and buried alive’. One of her guilty lovers killed himself: the other was ordered to be publicly whipped like a slave, and then put to death. After this, ‘the distemper, which had attacked the women and caused so great a mortality among them, presently ceased.’ Again, the pestilence is attributed to the imperfect performance of some detail of ritual, which must be expiated forthwith, if the sender of the pestilence is to be appeased. Its special incidence on women seemed to bring home the guilt to them. It was meet therefore that a woman’s life should be its expiation. Such is the earliest detailed record of human sacrifice for deliverance from plague, but we shall meet it again and again in the history of epidemic pestilence. Surely the tiger in man is but lightly prisoned in his human cage.
Human sacrifice was probably world-wide in the earliest ages of nations. The Phoenicians[62] resorted to it in times of national calamity, such as epidemic pestilence. There is abundant evidence from the Bible[63] and elsewhere, that human sacrifice was habitual in primitive Semitic religion. The Israelites were apt to assert that they learnt these practices from the peoples whom they superseded in the land of Canaan, but it must be remembered that they came of the same stock as these races. Pausanias[64] refers to the legend of Leos, who is said to have sacrificed his daughters, at the bidding of the oracle, to save Athens from a famine; and in speaking of the ruined city of Potniae[65] he says that the oracle of Delphi told them that they would get rid of a pestilence only by the sacrifice of a blooming boy to Dionysus, who had sent it for the murder of his priest. At the Athenian feast of Thargelia in May, a man and a woman were led through the city and stoned to death outside its walls, a man for the men, and a woman for the women: and a similar practice maintained in the Saturnalia at Rome. But with the advance of civilization animal substitutes came to replace the human victims.
Philostratus[66] cites another notable instance of human sacrifice for deliverance from pestilence. The Ephesians had summoned Apollonius (first century a.d.) to come and check the plague. On his arrival he at once set himself to encourage the citizens, and gathered them together to the theatre ‘where now stands the statue of Averruncus. Here they found an ill-looking old beggar, whom Apollonius ordered them to stone to death, as being the enemy of the gods. As soon as they set to stoning him, fire darted from the old beggar’s eyes, so that they knew him for a demon. After they had killed him, Apollonius ordered them to remove the stones from the corpse, and they found instead of a human body a fierce dog vomiting foam, as if mad.... The form this dog assumed was like that given to the statue of Averruncus.’
The blood-lust of panic terror, which found its gratification in the slaying of Urbinia, is the lineal descendant of the cold-blooded ritual of human sacrifice: no human passion is so cruel as fear. But we shall fail to find even this palliation for the torture and killing of the ‘unctores’, both in Genoa and Milan, and for the wholesale massacre of Jews at the time of the Black Death, carried through by legal process far more deliberate, far more lengthy, far less impassioned than any rite of human sacrifice.
In the pestilence of 461 b.c. the mortality was so great that it became necessary to throw the dead bodies into the Tiber. Livy[67] says that a cattle epizootic preceded the epidemic, and that the necessity of admitting the cattle within the walls, owing to the invasion of Roman territory by the Aequans and Volscians, increased the malignity of the distemper. In this crisis of calamities, the Senate ordered the people to supplicate the protection of the gods. These ‘supplications’ took the form of expiatory processions, and seem to have been introduced from Greece to Rome. Like the Salic processions they moved to the sound of music and singing, as they visited the sanctuaries of the gods, prostrating themselves before their statues, clasping their knees and kissing their hands and feet. Livy[68] holds that the guardian gods and the city’s good fortune saved Rome at this juncture, as fear of the pestilence induced the enemy to divert their attack to the richer and healthy Tusculan territory. Just before this outbreak Livy[69] says that the sky seemed to be lit up by an exceeding bright light. It is not clear what celestial phenomenon he has in mind, but it is noteworthy as perhaps anticipating the fixed belief of later days in comets, as harbingers of pestilence.