The Religious Experience of the Roman People / From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus

by W. Warde Fowler

First, then, I take sacrifice, dealing only with the general principles of sacrificial rites, so far as we can discern them in the numerous details which have come down to us. The word sacrificium, let us note, in its widest sense, may cover any religious act in which something is made sacrum, i.e. (in its legal sense) the property of a deity;[347] I am not now concerned to conjecture what exactly may have been the meaning of this immortal word before it was embodied in the ius divinum. "Sacrificium" is limited in practical use by the Romans themselves to offerings, animal or cereal, made on the spot where the deity had taken up his residence, or at some place on the boundary of land or city (e.g. the gate) which was under his protection, or (in later times at least) at a temporary altar erected during a campaign. Thus it was as much a sacrificium when the paterfamilias threw at each meal a portion of the food into the fire, the residence of Vesta, as when the consul offered a victim to Mars on the eve of a battle.

Sacrifices have generally been divided into the three classes of (1) honorific, where the offering is believed to be in some sense a gift to the deity; (2) piacular, or sin-offerings, where the victim was usually burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering together with him.[348] The two former are constant and typical in the Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance being attached to the due distribution.[349] Here the Latin race "yearly acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the epulum Iovis on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the magistrates and senate.[350] But we have not yet arrived at the age when this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however, faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a whole, but of the thirty curiae into which it was divided,[351] there seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though invisible. Yet the ius divinum of the Roman State assuredly did not encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State festivals, in which we cannot include even the feriae Latinae, the sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular. If I am not mistaken, the idea of participation by the people in solemn sacred rites was discouraged by the Roman priesthood; in the ius divinum the line drawn between sacrum and profanum was clear; scenes of gluttony or revelry, like the Greek hecatombs, were eliminated from the sacra publica, as I have already pointed out. Not till the advent of the Sibylline books and the Graecus ritus did the people take an active part in the State religion; their duty was merely to abstain from disturbance during the performance of sacred rites. "Feriis iurgia amovento" is the only reference in Cicero's imaginary sketch of the ius divinum to the conduct of the citizen on festival days.[352][352] Within the family, the curia, the gens, there might be direct and active participation in daily or yearly ceremonies, but it was an essential principle of the life of the city-state that its business, religious as well as civil, should be carried out for the citizens by officials specially appointed.

In the typical and organised worship of the State, i.e. sacrifice honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the ius divinum, the utmost care was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable to the deity; that nothing profanum should cross the threshold of the divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense of obligation and duty, pietas, as they called it, was thus very early developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet bred contempt; religio, as we saw, was still strong among them—the feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical end in view, it was particularly true of them.

First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex, who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa, Livy has described his inauguratio in terms of the ius divinum of later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.[353] After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the lucky side) with veiled head, holding the lituus[354] of his office in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the regiones from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the ager Romanus, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen might be accepted. Then, passing the lituus to his left hand, he laid his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter, if it be thy will (fas) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within the limits which I have marked out." Then he said aloud what auspicia he sought for (i.e. whether of birds, lightning, or what); and when they appeared, Numa descended as rex from the citadel. This process was called inauguratio; it is attested for the confirmation of the election of the three flamines maiores, the rex, and the augurs, in historical times,[355] whatever was the method of that election, and without it the priest was not believed to be acceptable to the gods. It is not mentioned by Roman writers in connection with the Pontifices or the Vestals; if this be not merely from dearth of evidence, it is not easy to account for, unless the reason were that neither body was specially concerned with sacrifice. But the principle is perfectly clear—that the person who is to represent the community in worship must be one of whom the numina openly express approval.

A priest, sacerdos, is thus a person set apart by special ritual for the service of the sacra populi Romani. The rex no doubt himself made the selection and supervised the inauguratio of the other priests at whose head he was. When the kingship came to an end, his powers of this kind passed to the pontifex maximus; and it may be as well to add at once that his sacrificial powers, though they were in a special sense inherited by a priest who took his title, the rex sacrorum, passed with the civil power to all magistrates cum imperio, who wore the toga praetexta symbolic of priestly function, and had the right of presiding at sacrificial rites both at home and in the field. Thus magistrate and priest, though quite distinct under the Republic from the point of view of public law, have certain characteristics in common as deriving from a common source in the powers of the rex.[356]

But to return to the period of Numa and the calendar: it was not only necessary that the priest should be acceptable to the gods, but that he should be marked off from the rest of the community as being dedicated to their service. As Dr. Jevons says,[357] in all early religions priests are marked off from other worshippers, partly by what they do, and partly by what they may not do; and what he means is (1) that the priest originally was the person who alone could slay a victim; (2) that in consequence of his sacredness he was subject to a great number of restrictions. I have already spoken of these restrictions or priestly taboos in my second lecture; and as I believe that in the period we are now dealing with they were little more than a survival, I shall not return to them now. But of the outward insignia, which marked off the priest as alone entitled to perform the essential act of worship, the sacrifice, and which bring him out of the region of the profanum into that of sacrum, I must say a few words before going farther.

In historical times the actual slaying of the victim was done by subordinates, popae, victimarii, etc.; but there is no doubt whatever that it was originally the work of the priest, for he seems at all times to have used one gesture which is clearly symbolic of it,[358] and there are traces also of a practice of wearing the toga in such a way as to leave the right arm free for the act.[359] That toga, or any other special robe worn by the priest, was always in whole or part red or purple. The purple-edged toga praetexta was worn both by priests and magistrates, and by children under age; and I think there is good reason to believe that in all these cases the original idea was the same—that they took part, directly or indirectly, as primary or secondary agents in sacrificial acts. The Salii and the augurs wore the trabea, which was of purple or red, or both; the flamines had a special robe about the colour of which we are not informed, but the Flaminica Dialis wore a purple garment called rica, and a red veil called flammeum, which was also worn by the bride in the religious ceremony of marriage. Whether we are to see in this prevalence of red or purple any symbolism of the shedding of blood in sacrifice I cannot be sure, but the inference is a tempting one, and has been put forward with confidence by some recent investigators. It is worth noting that the Vestals, who did not sacrifice animals, wore white only.[360] If the red colour has anything to do with blood-shedding, it is probably more than merely symbolic; it may mean that the sacrificing priest partakes of that life and strength which he passes on to the god through the blood, that is the life, of the victim.[361]

The Roman priests had also other insignia, of which the original meaning is less evident. The Flamen Dialis, and probably all the flamines, wore a cap with an olive-twig fastened to the top of it; this is well shown in the sculptures of the Ara Pacis of Augustus.[362] The flaminicae had a head-dress called tutulus, which consisted in part, at least, of a purple fillet or ribbon. The flamines, when actually sacrificing, wore a galerus, or hood of some kind made of the skin of a victim, and the Flamen Dialis in particular wore one made of the skin of a white heifer sacrificed to Jupiter.[363] In these various ways all priests were outwardly shown to be holy men, sacerdotes, marked off from the profanum vulgus. Only for the pontifices we have no information as to a special dress, just as we also have none as to their inauguratio.[364]

Thus there is no question that the priests were chosen and separated from the people in such a way as to meet with the approval of the gods; and even the acolytes, camilli and camillae, boys and girls who frequently appear in sacrificial scenes on monuments, wore the toga praetexta, and, in order to be acceptable, must be the children of living parents.[365] This rule has lately been the subject of a discussion by Dr. Frazer, on which he has brought to bear, as usual, a great range of learning. He regards the restriction not so much as a matter of good omen, i.e. of freedom from contamination by the death of a parent, but as pointing to a notion that they were "fuller of life and therefore luckier than orphans."[366] Whether or no this explanation is the right one, it is quite consistent, as we shall see directly, with the general idea of sacrifice at Rome, and the learning by which it is supported is in any case of interest and value.

There is abundant evidence from historical times that all worshippers, and therefore a fortiori all priests, when sacrificing, had to be personally clean and free from every kind of taint; a rule which also held good for the utensils used in the worship, which in many cases at least were of primitive make and material, not such as were in common use.[367] The need of personal purity is well expressed by Tibullus in his description of a rural festival[368]:—