As it was necessary to protect the homestead and its land by a sacred boundary, so the city had to be clearly marked off from all that was outside of it. Its walls were sacred, or, strictly speaking, a certain imaginary line outside of them called the pomoerium was sacred. This is well shown in the traditional method of founding a city even in historical times, e.g. a colonia, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch.[450] A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze—a rule which shows at once the antiquity and the religious character of the rite, for iron, as we saw, was taboo in most religious ceremonies. A rectangular furrow was drawn where the walls of the city were to be; the earth was turned inwards to mark the future line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomoerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it, and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This probably meant, as Plutarch expressed it, that the walls (or rather the pomoerium), were sacred while the gates were profane; had the gates been holy, scruple would necessarily have been felt about the passage in and out of them of things profane. Thus the pomoerium was a boundary line between the sacred and the profane, like that of the farm; but in historical times it acquired a more definite religious meaning, for within it there could only dwell those deities who belonged to the city and its inhabitants, i.e. the di indigetes, and who were recognised as its divine inhabitants.[451] And only within its limits could the auspicia of the city be taken.
We should naturally expect that this sacred boundary would have its holiness secured or revived by an annual lustratio like that of the farm and pagus; and so no doubt it was. But the memory of this survives only in the word amburbium, which, on the analogy of ambarvalia, must mean a rite of this processional kind. Luckily we have definite knowledge of the real lustratio of a city in those ritualistic inscriptions of Iguvium which I have more than once referred to.[452] It is the lustratio of the arx, the citadel of Iguvium, which we may guess to have been the original oppidum or germ of the historical city. The details are complex, and show clear traces of priestly organisation; but the main features stand out unmistakably. A procession goes round the arx (ocris Fisia), with the suovetaurilia—ox, sheep, and pig—as in the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, while sacrifice and prayer are offered on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. There were three gates, and each of them is the scene of sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, and they need to be strengthened by annual religious operations; such at least is the most obvious explanation. Whether the Fratres Attiedii would have been able to explain it thus we may doubt; neither in the sacrificial ritual nor in the prayers, as recorded in the inscription, do we find any clear trace of a distinction between the sacred and the profane, or of the idea of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary. So far as we can judge from the prayers, the object is really a religious one, to implore the deities of the city to preserve it and all within it. The language of these prayers hardly differs from that in which a Christian Church of to-day asks for a blessing on a community.[453]
So far I have been speaking of the permanent separation of land or city by a sacred boundary line from the profane world without. But human beings en masse might be subjected to the same process—an army, for example, at the opening of the season of war; and so, too, might its appurtenances—horses, arms, and trumpets. In the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who passed some years in Rome in the time of Augustus, we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host and sacrificed to Mars. This was doubtless the early form of the political census, which had a military meaning and origin. But we have a more exact and reliable account of a similar rite in the Iguvian documents, which contain instructions for the lustratio of the people apparently before a campaign.[454] So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the male population was assembled in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round this host a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer to Mars and two female associates of his power, the object of which, as we can read in the words of the prayer, was to bless the people of Iguvium and to curse its enemies, who were to be confounded and frightened and paralysed.
Here religion of a rude sort has been superimposed on the originally magical ceremonial. For the idea must have been that by drawing a "magic circle" around the host, which might have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the ager Romanus (or Iguvinus), where hostile magical influences might be brought to bear against them, they were in some mysterious way marked off, rendered "holy," and so protected against the wiles of the enemy. A later and animistic age would think of them as needing protection against hostile spirits, of whose ways and freaks they were of course entirely ignorant. Of these primitive ideas about the danger of entering hostile territory and of leaving your own, Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in his Golden Bough (i. 304 foll.), both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. A single parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which Dr. Frazer has not mentioned, may suffice us here. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring between the severed limbs of a dog:[455] the principle is here the same as in Italy, but the method differs slightly. In each case some mysterious influence is brought to bear on the whole army without exception; but in the one case a line is drawn round it, in the other it passes through the parts of an object which must have been supposed to be endowed with magical power.
And once more, in spring before the season of arms, all the belongings of the host were subjected to some process of the same kind. I have alluded to this in my lecture on the calendar, and need not now reproduce the evidence of the Equirria at the end of February and on March 14, or of the Quinquatrus on March 19, when the lustratio took place of the shields (ancilia) of the Salii, the war-priests of Mars, and the Tubilustrium on March 23, which tells its own tale.[456] But I may recall the fact that the calendar supplies us also with evidence that on the return of the host to their own territory all these lustrations had to be repeated in order to rid men, horses, arms, and trumpets of such evil contagion as they might have contracted during their absence. It may be that one special object of lustration after the return of an army was to rid it, with all belonging to it, of the taint of bloodshed, just as the Jewish warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp.[457] But in the Roman pontifical law this idea is hardly discernible, and the only trace I can find of it is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general's car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem."[458] I may add here that the passage of a triumphing army through the Porta triumphalis, which was probably an isolated arch in the Campus Martius just outside the city wall,[459] most likely had as its original meaning the separation of the host from the profane world in which it had been moving; and the triumphal arches of later times, which were within the city, were thus developed architecturally from an origin which belongs to the region of magic.[460] To the same class of ideas, if I am not much mistaken, belongs the familiar Italian practice of compelling a surrendered army to pass under the yoke. As Livy explains this when he first mentions it, it was symbolical of subjection: "ut exprimatur confessio subactam domitamque esse gentem";[461] and this was no doubt the idea in the minds of the historical Romans. But it may well have been that it had its root in a process which was supposed to deprive the conquered enemy of all dangerous contagion—to separate them from their own land and people before they came into peaceful contact with their conquerors.
A last word before I leave this part of my subject. Though it is interesting to try to get at the root-idea of these processes of lustratio, we must remember that in the Rome of history they had lost not only such magical meaning as they ever had, but also much of the religious meaning which in course of time was superimposed upon it. The sacrifices and the prayers remained, but the latter were muttered and unheard by the people. And except in the country districts these ceremonies were more and more absorbed, as time went on, into the social, military, and political life of the community, as e.g. the lustration of the host became a political census; or they tended to disappear altogether, like the ambarvalia and perhaps the amburbium. They grew up in the religious experience of the Romans, beginning with its very earliest and quasi-magical forms; but they came at last to represent that experience no longer, and when we meet with them in historical times it is impossible to ascribe to them any real influence on life and conduct. Lustratio never in pagan Italy developed an ethical meaning as catharsis did in Greece.[462] But meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire, until the Roman Church adapted them to its own ritual and gave them, as we saw, a new meaning. As the cloud-shadows still move slowly over the hollows of the Apennines, so does the procession of the patron saint pass still through the streets of many an Italian city.[463]
NOTES TO LECTURE IX
[406] Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 63.
[407] See Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 615 foll.
[408] C.I.L. i. Nos. 43 foll.