This elaborate Roman ceremonial consisted in the main of sacrifices of different kinds, conducted with an endless but ordered variety of detail, of prayers, processions, and festivities, the object of which was either to obtain certain practical results, to discover the will of the gods, or to rejoice with the divine inhabitants of the city over the prosperous event of some undertaking. When we survey it in the Calendar as a whole, it seems to fall naturally into three divisions, which correspond with and illustrate the development of the State from its constituent materials. The Calendar contains in fact in a fossilized condition the remains of three different strata of religious or social development.
(1) Here and there we find survivals of what we can only regard as the most primitive condition of human life in ancient Latium: that of men dwelling on forest-clad hill-tops, surrounded by a world of spirits, some of which have taken habitation in, or are in some sort represented by, objects such as trees, animals, or stones. Examples of such objects are the oak of Jupiter Feretrius, the sacred fig-tree of Rumina, the stone of Terminus with its buried sacrifice, and the wolf, the wood-pecker, and spear of Mars. To this earliest stratum may also belong in their ultimate origin those quaint sacrificial or semi-dramatic rites of which we have had examples in the Lupercalia, the Fordicidia, and the Parilia. The casting of the Argei into the Tiber may perhaps also be reckoned here, though connected later on with certain divisions of the developed city of which the meaning and origin are lost to us. This primitive population knew also of charms and spells and omens, not reduced indeed as yet to a definite system, of which the Calendar naturally supplies hardly any indications, while in Ovid and Cato not a few survivals meet us. But the investigation of the oldest culture of central Italy is more especially the province of archaeology, and to the archaeologists, who are now in Italy doing excellent and elaborate work, I must be content to leave it.
(2) We next come conjecturally to clearly-defined evidence of a period in which the ordered processes of agriculture, and the settled life of the farm-house, are the distinctive features. We have the beginnings of a calendar in the observation of the quarters of the moon and their connexion with the deities of light. We have the discipline of the house, represented in the cult of Vesta the hearth-spirit, under the care of the daughters of the family, while the sons as flamines have their special sacrificial duties, the head of the house presiding over all, and having as his own special department the worship of the spirit of the door-way (Janus). The occupations of the family are reflected in the series of festivals which represent the processes and perils of pastoral and agricultural industry: e.g. the Robigalia, Ambarvalia, Vestalia, Consualia, Opiconsivia, Vinalia, Saturnalia, and Terminalia: this last indicating also the idea of property, whether of the community or the individual. We have also clear traces of the union of farms in a group (pagus); for the Paganalia still survived in the full-grown city, and both at the Saturnalia and Compitalia the households met together at the winter period of ease and rejoicing.
(3) The further development of social life is also reflected in the annual rites we have been investigating. We see the aggregation of small communities in the Septimontium, in the Fornacalia or feast of the Curiae, possibly also in the ritual of the twenty-four or twenty-seven Sacella Argeorum, round which a procession seems to have gone in March and May. The Parentalia again is the systematized cult of the dead in their own city, outside the walls of the city of the living. The Lares Praestites, worshipped on May 1, are the guardian spirits of the whole community. The Regia, the dwelling of the king, is its political and religious centre, with its sacrarium of Mars, the peculiar deity of the stock, and with the house and hearth of Vesta close by, now grown to be the symbol of the State’s vitality. The Vestals and Flamines have become priests of special worships in an organized state, and at the head of all is the Rex, still specially concerned with the cult of Janus, but representing in his priestly capacity the whole community. The steadily increasing tendency to organize, a tendency rooted in the very fibre of this people, is producing colleges of pontifices and augurs, to assist by associated effort in making sure of the laws of intercourse with the unseen world, and of the best methods of divining its will and intention. And lastly, not only have we found in the festivals traces of the growth and systematization of the life of the city, but in the great Latin festival we have also religious evidence of the early tendency of the cities of Latin blood to combine in some sort with each other.
We have thus reached what has been called by Preller the period of Numa, the king with whose name and personality the Romans always associated the redaction of the Fasti and the state-organization of their religion: a personality so clearly conceived by them as to bear witness at once to its own historical reality, and to their conviction of the vital importance of his work. Before we go further, let us pause here to interrogate the Calendar as to the nature of the divine beings who in these same stages of development were the objects of popular worship. The simplest way to do this will be to present a table showing the list of the most ancient festivals, with the deities concerned in them, so far as they can be identified, in a parallel column:—
| Festivals. | Deities. |
|---|---|
| KALENDS | Juno. |
| IDES | Jupiter. |
| EQUIRRIA | Mars. |
| LIBERALIA | Liber. |
| FORDICIDIA | Tellus? |
| CERIALIA | Ceres. |
| PARILIA | Pale? |
| ROBIGALIA | Robigus. |
| LEMURIA | Ghosts (unburied). |
| ARGEORUM SACRA | Unknown. |
| AGONIA | Vediovis? |
| VESTALIA | Vesta. |
| MATRALIA | Mater Matuta. |
| POPLIFUGIA | Unknown. |
| LUCARIA | Unknown. |
| NEPTUNALIA | Neptunus. |
| FURRINALIA | Furrina? |
| PORTUNALIA | Portunus. |
| VINALIA | Jupiter. |
| CONSUALIA | Consus. |
| VOLCANALIA | Volcanus. |
| OPICONSIVIA | Ops Consiva. |
| MEDITRINALIA | Unknown. |
| FONTINALIA | Fons? |
| AGONIA | Unknown. |
| CONSUALIA | Consus. |
| SATURNALIA | Saturnus. |
| OPALIA | Ops. |
| DIVALIA | Angerona? |
| LARENTALIA | Larentia? |
| AGONIA | Janus? |
| CARMENTALIA. | Carmenta. |
| LUPERCALIA | Unknown. |
| QUIRINALIA | Quirinus. |
| FERALIA | Buried Ancestors. |
| TERMINALIA | Terminus. |
| REGIFUGIUM | Unknown. |
Here it will be noticed that in those festivals which seem to be survivals from the oldest stratum of civilization (the period of Faunus, as Preller has named it), viz. the Lupercalia, Parilia, Fordicidia, Argeorum Sacra, the deities concerned are either altogether doubtful, or so wanting in clearness and prominence as to be altogether subordinate in interest to the details of the ceremony. The Parilia and Fordicidia were believed in later times to have belonged to Pales and Tellus; but our authority for the grounds of such belief is not strong, and as a matter of fact these two, together with the sacrifice of the October horse, were interconnected by details of antique ceremonial, rather than separately defined by their relation to particular numina. In other festivals which may have possibly come down from the oldest period, the deity is almost entirely lost. Here is good evidence of the indistinctness of the Roman conception of the divine; the cult appealed to this people as the practical method of obtaining their desires, but the unseen powers with whom they dealt in this cult were beyond their ken, often unnamed, and only visible in the sense of being seated in, or in some sort symbolized by, tree or stone or animal. They are often multiplex, like the Fauni, Silvani, Lares, Penates, Semones, Carmentes; or they run into each other, like Bona Dea, Maia, Tellus, Ceres, Dea Dia, and others. Only the great deity of the stock stands out at all clearly; Father Mars of the Romans; Father Diovis of the whole Latin race; to these we may perhaps add the Hercules or Genius, and Juno, representing respectively the male and female principles of human life.
In the second and third of the strata which the Calendar offers to the excavator, representing the ordered life of the household and afterwards of the city, we still find much of the same indistinctness. Vesta indeed, the spirit of the hearth-fire, becomes clearly though not personally delineated; so too, but in a less degree, does Janus the spirit of the doorway. Two other groups of spirits also occupy the house; the Lares, who may have been the spirits of dead ancestors duly buried, and the Penates or spirits of the store-chamber; both of them becoming sufficiently clear in the popular conception to be represented by images at a very early period. But in the round of ancient festivals, some at least of the so-called gods, so far as we can guess at their original nature, hardly deserve that name. Liber and Ceres seem to have been originally general names for an ill-defined class of spirits; Robigus is the spirit of the mildew; Consus and Ops are not personalities, but numina protecting the gathered harvest, as Saturnus probably protected the sown seed. The Compitalia was concerned only with the Lares Compitales, spirits of the crossways; in the Paganalia we have but very indistinct information as to the object of worship. The Vinalia, marking a later and more skilled agricultural process, seems on the other hand always to have been clearly connected with Jupiter himself.
Thus in the so-called period of Numa, the period of the earlier monarchy and the first organization of the city-state, the religious life of the community had become highly systematized in respect of the cult, of the priest in charge of it, and the ius which governed all the citizens in their relation to the world of divinities. Of any real change however in the character of these divinities, of any approach to polytheism in the way of an increased individuality of conception, of iconic representation, or definite temple-worship, the Calendar then drawn up supplies no certain evidence. There may indeed have been a tendency towards a clearer definition of numina, arising from the very fact of the definite organization of prayer and sacrifice, and of the allotment of cults to particular priesthoods or families. There may, even at that early stage in Roman history, have been an influence at work on the Roman mind, coming from Etruria and Greece, where polytheism found its nourishment in works of art and mythological fancy. These are possibilities of which we must take account, but the Calendar has nothing positive to tell us of them.
It is when we advance to the later monarchy, which we may speak of without hesitation as an Etruscan dynasty, that we find a change beginning, both in the forms and objects of the cult, which marks an epoch in Roman religious history. The oldest Calendar, that of the large letters in the Fasti, tells us of course nothing of this. But in the additamenta ex fastis, and in later literary allusions, we have a considerable body of material to help us in following out the character and consequences of this change. It is at this point, or rather at the end of the monarchy, that we begin to hear of the building of real temples, as distinct from luci, sacella, arae, or fana; of the introduction into these of statues of the gods, of the Graecus ritus in sacrifice, and of the appearance of new deities, some of them apparently connected with new elements of population.