It does not seem probable that in the Republican period the cult of Apollo had any special influence, either religious or ethical, for the Roman people generally. It was a priestly experiment—a new physician was called in at perilous times, according to the fashion of the Roman oligarchy, either to give advice by his oracles, or to receive honours for his benefits as ἀλεξίκακος. It is in the age of Augustus that the cult begins to be important; the family of the Caesars was said to have had an ancient connexion with it[[762]], and after the victory at Actium, where a temple of Apollo stood on the promontory, Augustus not only enlarged and adorned this one, but built another on the Palatine, near his own house, to Apollo Palatinus. But for the ‘Apollinism’ of Augustus, and for the important part played by the god in the ludi saeculares of B.C. 17, I must refer the reader to other works[[763]].
xiv Kal. Sext. (July 19). NP.
LUCAR[IA]. (MAFF. AMIT.)
xii Kal. Sext. (July 21). NP.
LUCAR[IA]. (MAFF. AMIT.)
Here, as in the next two festivals we have to consider, we are but ‘dipping buckets into empty wells.’ The ritual, and therefore the original meaning of this festival, is wholly lost to us, as indeed it was to the Romans of Varro’s time. Varro, in his list of festivals, does not even mention this one; but it is possible that some words have here dropped out of his text[[764]]. The only light we have comes at second-hand from Verrius Flaccus[[765]]. ‘Lucaria festa in luco colebant Romani, qui permagnus inter viam Salariam et Tiberim fuit, pro eo, quod victi a Gallis fugientes[[766]] e praelio ibi se occultaverint.’ This passage reminds us of the story explanatory of the Poplifugia, and might suggest, as in that case, an expiatory sacrifice and flight of the people from a scapegoat destined to carry away disease. But here we know of no vestigia fugae in the cult, such as Varro tells us were apparent at the Poplifugia.
The only possible guess we can make must rest on the name itself, taken together with what Festus tells us of the great wood once existing between the Via Salaria and the Tiber, in which the festival was held—a wood which no doubt occupied the Pincian hill, and the region afterwards laid out in gardens by Lucullus, Pompeius, and Sallust the historian. Lucaria is formed from lucar as Lemuria from lemur; and lucar, though in later times it meant ‘the sum disbursed from the aerarium for the games[[767]],’ drawn probably from the receipts of the sacred groves, may also at one time itself have meant a grove. An inscription from the Latin colony of Luceria shows us lucar in this sense[[768]]:
IN · HOCE · LUCARID · STIRCUS · NE · IS · FUNDATID, &c.
Now there can be no doubt about the great importance of woods, or rather of clearings in them, in the ancient Italian religion. ‘Nemus and lucus,’ says Preller[[769]], ‘like so many other words, remind us of the old Italian life of woodland and clearing. Nemus is a pasturage, lucus a “light” or clearing[[770]], in the forest, where men settled and immediately began to look to the interests of the spirits of the woodland, and especially of Silvanus, who is at once the god of the wild life of the woodland and of the settler in the forest—the backwoodsman.’ The woods left standing as civilization and agriculture advanced continued to be the abodes of numina, not only of the great Jupiter, who, as we shall see, was worshipped in groves all over Italy[[771]], and of Diana, who at Aricia bore the title of Nemorensis, but of innumerable spirits of the old worship, Fauni, Silvani, and other manifestations of the idea most definitely conceived in the great god Mars[[772]]. But men could not of course know for certain what spirits dwelt in a wood, whose anger might be roused by intrusion or tree-felling; and old Cato, among his many prescriptions, material and religious, gives one in the form of an invocation to such unknown deities if an intrusion had to be made. It is worth quoting, and runs as follows[[773]]: ‘Lucum conlucare Romano more sic oportet. Porco piaculo facito. Sic verba concipito: Si Deus, si Dea es, quoium illud sacrum est, uti tibi ius siet porco piaculo facere, illiusce sacri coercendi ergo. Harumce rerum ergo, sive ego, sive quis iussu meo fecerit, uti id recte factum siet. Eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo immolando bonas preces precor, uti sies volens propitius mihi, domo familiaeque meae, liberisque meis. Harumce rerum ergo macte hoc porco piaculo immolando esto.’
Applying these facts to the problem of the Lucaria, though necessarily with hesitation, and remembering the position of the wood and the date of the festival, we may perhaps arrive at the following conclusion; that this was a propitiatory worship offered to the deities inhabiting the woods which bordered on the cultivated Roman ager. The time when the corn was being gathered in, and the men and women were in the fields, would be by no means unsuitable for such propitiation. It need not have been addressed to any special deity, any more than that of Cato, or as I believe, the ritual of the Lupercalia[[774]]; it belonged to the most primitive of Roman rites, and partly for that reason, partly also from the absorption of land by large private owners[[775]], it fell into desuetude. The grove of the Fratres Arvales and the decay of their cult (also addressed to a nameless deity) offers an analogy on the other side of Rome, towards Ostia.