LECTURE VII
THE DEITIES OF THE EARLIEST RELIGION: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
In the last lecture we interrogated the calendar as to the deities whose festivals are recorded in it, with the aid of what we know of the most ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults. The result may be stated thus: we found a number of impersonal numina, with names of adjectival form, such as Saturnus, Vertumnus, and so on; others with substantival names, Tellus, Robigus, Terminus; the former apparently functional deities, concerned in the operations of nature or man, and the latter spirits immanent in objects—Mother Earth herself, a stone, the mildew, or (like Janus and Vesta) the entrance and the hearth-fire of human dwellings or cities. Lastly, we found from the evidence, chiefly of the priesthoods, that certain more important divinities stand out from the crowd of spirits, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta; and we found some reason to think that these, and possibly a few of the others, by becoming the objects of priestly cura and caerimonia at particular spots in the city, were not unlikely to become also in some sense personal deities, to acquire a quasi-human personality, if they came by the chance. In the present lecture I must go rather more closely into such evidence as we possess bearing on the mental conception which these early Romans had formed of the divine beings whom they had admitted within their city.
And, first, we must be quite clear that in those early ages there was nothing in Rome which we can call a temple, as we understand the word; nor was there any such representation of a deity as we can call an image or eidolon. The deities were settled in particular spots of ground, which were made loca sacra, i.e. handed over to the deity by the process of consecratio authorised by the ius divinum.[291] It was matter of no moment what might be erected on this bit of ground; there might be a rude house like that of Vesta, round in shape like the oldest Italian huts; there might be a gateway like that of Janus; or the spot might be a grove, or a clearing within it (lucus), as in the case of Robigus or the Dea Dia of the Arval Brethren. All such places might be called by the general name fanum; and as a rule no doubt each fanum contained a sacellum, i.e. a small enclosure without a roof, containing a little altar (ara). These "altars" may at first have been nothing more than temporary erections of turf and sods; permanent stone altars were probably a later development. Servius tells us that in later times it was the custom to place a sod (caespes) on the top of such a stone altar, which must be one of the many survivals in cult of the usages of a simpler age.[292]
With such spots as these we cannot associate anything in the nature of an image of the deity established there; and we have every reason to believe that no such thing was known at Rome until the Etruscan temple of the Capitoline trias was built near the end of the regal period. Varro expressly declared that the Romans remained for more than 170 years without any images of their gods, and added that those who first introduced such images "civitatibus suis et metum dempsisse et errorem addidisse."[293] What he had in his mind is clear; he had indeed no direct knowledge of those early times, but he is thinking of a definite traditional date in the kingly period—the last year of the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, who, according to Varro's own account, built the temple on the Capitol and placed in it a statue of Jupiter.[294] That was the oldest image of which he knew anything; and, as Wissowa has remarked, his belief is entirely corroborated by the fact that in every single case in which the image of a god has any part in his cult, it is always either this Capitoline Jupiter or some deity of later introduction and non-Roman origin. It is also borne out by another significant and interesting fact—that the next image to be introduced, that of Diana in the temple on the Aventine, was a copy of the ξὁανον of Artemis at Massilia, itself a copy of the famous one at Ephesus.[295] Let us note that these two earliest statues were placed in roofed temples which were the dwelling-places of gods in an entirely new sense; so far no Roman deity of the city had been so housed, because he could not be thought of in terms of human life, as visible in human form and needing shelter. But this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking. In the religion of the family Ovid indeed has charmingly expressed it, perhaps on the authority of some lost passage of Varro[296]:—
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat, et mensae credere adesse deos.
Tibullus in one passage has mentioned what seems to be some rude attempt to give outward shape and form to an ancient pastoral deity[297]:—
lacte madens illic suberat Pan ilicis umbrae et facta agresti lignea falce Pales.