It is provokingly uncertain whether this ram was actually sacrificed to Janus: Varro does not say so, and Ovid only implies it[[1251]]. But we may perhaps assume it on the ground that once at least in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales[[1252]] the ram is mentioned as Janus’ victim.
If this be so, we are carried back by this sacrifice to the very beginnings of Rome, and get a useful clue to the nature of the god Janus. The Rex sacrorum was the special representative in later times of the king; the king, living in the Regia, was the equivalent in the State of the head of the household. The two most important and sacred parts of the house are the door (ianua, ianus), and the hearth (vesta)[[1253]], and the numina inhabiting and guarding these are Janus and Vesta, who, as is well known, were respectively the first and the last deities to be invoked at all times in Roman religious custom. The whole house certainly had a religious importance, like everything else in intimate relation to man; and Macrobius is not romancing when he says (quoting mythici) ‘Regnante Iano omnium domos religione et sanctitate fuisse munitas[[1254]].’ But the door and the hearth were of special importance, as the folk-lore of every people fully attests; and it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that we must look for the origin of Janus in the ideas connected with the house-door, just as we have always found Vesta in the fire on the hearth. Whatever be the true etymology of Janus, and however wild the interpretations of his nature and cult both in ancient and modern times, we shall always have firm ground to stand on if we view him in relation to the primitive worship of the house[[1255]]. There is hardly an attribute or a cult-title of Janus that cannot be deduced with reason from this root-idea.
The old Roman scholars, who knew as little about Janus as we do, started several explanations of a cosmical kind, which must have been quite strange to the average Roman worshipper. He was a sun-god[[1256]], and his name is the masculine form of Diana (= moon); he was the mundus, i. e. the heaven, or the atmosphere[[1257]]. These were, of course, mere guesses characteristic of a pedantic age which knew nothing of the old Roman religious mind. If Janus ever had been a nature-deity, his attributes as such were completely worn away in historical times, or had lost their essential character in the process of constant application to practical matters by a prosaic people. How far the Roman of the Augustan age understood his great deorum deus may be gathered from Ovid’s treatment of the subject, itself no doubt a poetical version of the learned speculation of Varro and others. The poet ‘interviews’ the deity with the object of finding out the lost and hidden meaning of his most obvious peculiarities, and the old god condescends to answer with a promptness and good temper that would do credit to the victims of the modern journalist. The curious thing is that the real origin, humble, simple, and truly Latin, escaped the observation both of the interviewer and the deity.
Before I state more definitely the grounds on which this simple explanation of Janus is based, it will be as well to deal shortly with the more ambitious ones.
1. The theory that Janus was a sun-god has the support of Roman antiquarians[[1258]], and was probably suggested by them to the moderns. Nigidius Figulus, the Pythagorean mystic, seems to have been the first to broach the idea: we have no evidence that Varro gave his sanction to it. It was Nigidius who first suggested the idea of the relation of Janus to Diana (Dianus, Diana = Janus, Jana), which found much favour with Preller and Schwegler[[1259]] at a time when neither comparative philology nor comparative mythology were as well understood as now. But the common argument, both in ancient and modern times, has been that which Macrobius quotes from certain speculators whom he does not name: ‘Ianum quidam solem demonstrari volunt, et ideo geminum quasi utriusque ianuae coelestis potentem, qui exoriens aperiat diem, occidens claudat,’ &c. It is obvious that this is pure speculation by a Roman of the cosmopolitan age: it is an attempt to explain the Janus geminus as the representation of one of the great forces of nature. But it has nothing to do with the ideas of the early Italian farmer.
2. The theory that Janus was a god of the ‘vault of heaven’ was also started by the ancients, as may be seen from the chapter of Macrobius quoted above. Recently it has been adopted by Professor Deecke in his Etruscan researches[[1260]]. He seems to hold that Janus in Etruria, as a god of the arch of heaven, was represented on arches and gates in that country, and came to Rome when the Romans learnt the secret of the arch from the Etruscans. That the Romans were the pupils of the Etruscans in this particular seems to be true; but if Janus only came to Rome with the arch (Deecke says in Numa’s time) it is hard to see how he could have so quickly gained his peculiar place in Roman worship and legend. I cannot think that Deecke has here improved on the conclusions of his predecessor.
Speculations about Janus as a heaven-god have been pushed still further. Here is a passage from a book which is almost a work of genius[[1261]], yet embodies many theories of which its author may by this time have repented: ‘He who prayed (in ancient Italy) began his prayer looking to the East, but ended it looking to the West. Herein we find expressed the conception of the unity and indivisibility of Nature; whose symbol is the most characteristic figure of the Italian religion, the double-headed Janus, the highest god, and the god of all things, all times, and all gods. He unites the dualistic opposites which complete the world—beginning and end, morning and evening, outgoing and ingoing. He is the god of the year, which finds its completion in its own orbit, and as he is the god of time, so he is the god of the Kosmos, which like a circle displays both beginning and end at once.’ He then quotes a passage from Messalla, which Macrobius has preserved, in support of this astonishing product of the rude mind of the primitive Roman[[1262]]. Of this Messalla we only know that he was consul in 53 B.C., and that (as Macrobius tells us) he was augur for fifty-five years, in the course of which period, after the fashion of his day, he wrote works of which the object was to find a philosophic basis for the quaint phenomena of the Roman religion. His speculations on the double head of Janus cannot help us to discover the primitive nature of our deity; Janus may have been the ancient heaven-god of the Latins, but these guesses are the product of a spurious and eclectic Greek philosophy.
3. There is another possible explanation of Janus, which is not mentioned in Roscher’s article, but is perhaps worth as much consideration as the two last. Professor Rhys, in his Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Mythology[[1263]], somewhat casually identified Janus with the Celtic god Cernunnos, whom he considers to be the Gallic deity called by Caesar Dis Pater. The one striking fact in favour of this equation is that Cernunnos was represented as having three faces, and like Janus, as a head without a body—the lower portion of the block being utilized for other purposes[[1264]]. He seems to have been a chthonic deity, and is compared to and even identified by Rhys with Heimdal of the Norsemen and Teutons, who was the warder or porter of the gods, and of the underworld[[1265]], who sits as the ‘wind-listening’ god, whose ears are of miraculous sharpness, who is the father of man, and the sire of kings. Both Cernunnos and Heimdal are thought further to have been like Janus, the fons et origo of all things. According to Caesar the Gauls believed themselves to be descended from their deity; and both the Celtic and Scandinavian gods seem to have had, like the Roman, some connexion with the divisions of time.
It must be allowed that these two gods taken together supply parallels to Janus’ most salient characteristics; and even to one or two of the less prominent and more puzzling ones, such as the connexion with springs[[1266]]. It is not impossible that all three may have grown out of a common root; but in the cases of Cernunnos and Heimdal it does not seem any longer possible to trace this, owing to heavy incrustations of poetical mythology. In the case of the Roman, the chance is a better one, in spite of philosophical speculation, ancient and modern.
We return from philosophers and mythologists to early Rome. The one fact on which we must fix our attention is that on the north-east of the forum Romanum was the famous Janus geminus, which from representations on coins[[1267]] we can see was not a temple, but a gateway, with entrance and exit connected by walls, within which was, we may suppose, the double-headed figure of Janus which is familiar on Roman coins. The same word janus is applied to the gate and to the numen who guarded it, lived in it, and was as inseparable from it as Vesta from the fire on the hearth[[1268]]. The word does not seem to have been used for the gate of a city, but for the point of passage into a space within a city, such as a market, or a street. At Rome there were several such jani[[1269]]; probably two or more leading into the forum, as well as the more famous one, which alone appears to have had a strictly religious signification[[1270]]. The connexion of the god with entrances is thus a certainty, though we are puzzled by his apparent absence from the gates of the city[[1271]]. The double head would signify nothing transcendental, but simply that the numen of the entrance to house or market was concerned both with entrance and exit. It is not peculiar to Italy, or to Janus, but is found on coins in every part of the Mediterranean (Roscher, Lex. 53 foll.): in no case, it is worth noting, does the double head represent any of the great gods of heaven, such as Zeus, Apollo, &c., but Dionysus, Boreas, Argos, unknown female heads[[1272]], &c. Its history does not seem to have been worked out; but we can be almost sure that it does not represent the sun, and has no relation to the arch of heaven.