[369] Cic. de Legibus, ii. 10. 24.
[370] Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 352 foll.; consult the index for further allusions to the subject. Cp. Farnell, Evolution of Religion, Lecture III. [Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen, 1910), has reached me too late for use in this chapter.
[371] Full details, with the most important references quoted in full, are in Marquardt, p. 172 foll.; but some of the latter are applicable only to the Graeco-Roman period.
[372] So we may gather from the Lex Furfensis of 58 b.c. (C.I.L. ix. 3513), and that of the Ara Augusti at Narbo of a.d. 12 (C.I.L. xii. 4333).
[373] The real origin of the pontifices and their name is unknown to us. If they took their name from the bridging of the Tiber, as Varro held (L.L. v. 83) and as the majority of scholars believe (see O. Gilbert, Rom. Topographie, ii. 220, note), the difficulty remains that they are found in such a city as Praeneste, where there was no river to be bridged, and where they could not well have been merely an offshoot from the Roman college; see Wissowa, R.K. p. 432, note. Nor can we explain how they came to be set in charge of the ius divinum; and where there are no data conjecture is useless.
[374] The covering of the head (operto capite, as opposed to aperto capite of the Graecus ritus) is usually explained as meant to shut out all sounds belonging to the world of the profanum; and the playing of the tibicines is interpreted in the same way. Hubert et Mauss explain the covered head differently: "le rituel romain prescrivit généralement l'usage du voile, signe de séparation et partant de consécration" (p. 28). Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 522, also holds that it is the outward sign of consecration; cp. S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes, et religions, i. 300 foll. The fact, noted by Miss Harrison, that in Festus's account of the ver sacrum (p. 379, ed. Müller) the children expelled were veiled, seems to point to the idea of dedication—unless, indeed, velabant here means that they blindfolded them.
[375] The wine was poured over the altar as well as on the victim, which suggests a substitution for blood; Arnobius vii. 29 and 30; Dion. Hal. vii. 72. I cannot find that any one of the many utensils used in sacrifice were for pouring out blood. Blood was, however, poured on the stone at the Terminalia (R.F. pp. 325-326); but the rite here described by Ovid seems to be a rural one, outside the ius divinum. In the sacrifice of victims to Hecate in Virg. Aen. vi. 243 foll., which cannot be ritus Romanus, the warm blood is collected in paterae; but nothing is said of what was done with it, nor does Servius help. Cp. Aen. viii. 106. In Lucretius v. 1202, "aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum," the context shows that the ritual alluded to is not old Roman. In Livy's description of the "occulti paratus sacri" of the Samnites (ix. 41), we find "respersae fando nefandoque sanguine arae, et dira exsecratio ac furiale carmen." Livy seems to think of this blood-sprinkling, whether the blood be human or animal, as unusual and horrible. Ancient, no doubt, is the practice, recorded in the Acta Fratr. Arv. (see Henzen, pp. 21 and 23), of using the blood in a religious feast, in the process of cooking: "porcilias piaculares epulati sunt et sanguem." (There is a mention of the pouring of blood in an inscription from Lusitania in C.I.L. ii. 2395.) For the use of wine as a substitute for blood, see the recently published work of Karl Kircher, "Die sakrale Bedeuting des Weines," in Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche, etc., p. 82 foll., where, however, the subject is not worked out.
[376] According to Lübbert (Commentarii pontificales, p. 121 foll.) magmentum is the same as augmentum, which word is also found (Varro, L.L. v. 112). Festus, p. 126, "magmentum magis augmentum"; Serv. Aen. iv. 57, to which passage I shall return. For the equivalent in the Vedic ritual of the cooking and offering of the exta, see Hubert et Mauss, op. cit. p. 60 foll.
[377] R.F. p. 89.
[378] ib. p. 10.