5. The cutting off the tail is explained by the idea that a remnant of the body of the representative of the Corn-spirit is sufficient to produce this spirit afresh in the vegetation of the coming year.
The examples Mannhardt quotes are numerous, and only gain force when brought together: I must refer the reader to his work for them[[1078]]. The word tail not only occurs frequently in harvest customs (e. g. the cutter of the last sheaf is called the wheat-tail or barley-tail[[1079]]), but there is little doubt that virtue was believed to reside in a tail[[1080]]. Who knows but that the preservation of the fox’s brush by fox-hunters has some origin of this kind?
6. The use made of the blood, which was kept and mixed with the ashes of the unborn calves of the Fordicidia, and with sulphur and bean-straw as a medicine to be distributed to the people at the Parilia, tells its own story without need of illustration (see on April 15 and 21). The blood was the life[[1081]]; the fire and sulphur-fumes were to purify and avert evil. Both men and beasts leapt over the fire into which this mixture was thrown at the Parilia, to gain new life and strength, and to avert the influences which might retard them.
Finally, Mannhardt has some remarks on the origin of the rite, which were suggested by Schwegler and Ambrosch[[1082]]. The Campus Martius, the scene of the sacrifice, was originally terra regis, cultivated for him by the people[[1083]]. When the king was the chief farmer, the horse’s head was carried to his house (regia) and fixed thereon, and the tail allowed to drip on to his hearth. When the neighbouring community of the Subura was united with that of the Palatine, the seat of the oldest community, the remembrance of their duality survived in the contest for the head: if the men of the Subura won it, they fixed it on the turris Mamilia, which may have been the dwelling of their own chief. Such contests are even now well known, or have[[1084]] but lately disappeared; and some of them may owe their origin to a fight for the Corn-spirit. Mannhardt gives some examples—one very curious one from Granada, and one from Brittany. At Derby, Hawick, Ludlow, and other places in this country, they or the recollection of them may still be found.
On the whole we may agree with him that the rite was in its origin one of the type to which he has referred it—a final harvest festival of the Latin farm. There is yet, however, a word to be said. He does not treat it from the point of view of the Roman calendar, and thus fails to note the turn it took when Latin farmers became Roman citizens. Wissowa, on the other hand, takes the calendar as his sole basis for judging of it, and with a strange perversity, as it seems to me, brushes Mannhardt’s conclusions aside, and would explain the rite simply as a sacrifice to the god of war[[1085]]. Now doubtless it had come to be this in the organized city-calendar, as Mars himself began to be brought into prominence in a new light, as the iuvenes of the community came to be more and more employed in war as well as agriculture, and as the Campus Martius came to be used as an exercising-ground for the armed host. The Calendars show us a curious correspondence between the beginning and the end of the season of arms, i. e. the middle of March and the middle of October, which leaves little doubt of the change which had taken place in the accepted character of the rites of the two periods by the time the Numan calendar was drawn up. This correspondence has already been noted[[1086]]; it may be here briefly referred to again.
On March 14[[1087]] there was a horse-race in the Campus Martius; on the 19th (Quinquatrus) was the lustratio armorum for the coming war-season, as is seen from the fact that the ancilia of the Salii at least—if not all arms—were lustrata on that day[[1088]]. So too on October 15 there was a horse-race, as we have seen, in the Campus Martius, and on the 19th we find the Armilustrium in the oldest calendars[[1089]], a name which tells its own tale. The inference is that the horse-races on Oct. 15 and March 14 had much the same origin, and it is just this which induces Wissowa to slight Mannhardt’s explanation of the former. He thinks that on each day the horses, like the arms, were lustrated (p. x.), i. e. before the war-season began, and after it was over. This is likely enough; but might not the same have been the case with the horses of the farm? The Roman farmer’s year began with March, and the heavy work of carrying, &c., would be over in October. I am disposed to think that we must look on organized war-material as a development later than the primitive times to which Mannhardt would carry us back, a side of Roman life which only in course of time became highly specialized.
We must never forget that the oldest Roman calendar is the record of the life of an agricultural people. So much is clear on the face of it; and in some instances, as in the Ambarvalia, Vestalia, Consualia, and in the October rite we have been discussing, something of the original intent can be made out from researches into modern folk-lore or savage custom. Yet this calendar is at the same time the table of feasts of a fully developed city-state, and in the process of its development the original meaning of the feasts was often lost, or they were explained by some mythical or historical event, or again they themselves may have changed character as the life of the people changed from an agricultural to a political one. In the rite of the October horse we may see an agricultural harvest custom taking a new shape and meaning as the State grew to be accustomed to war, just as Mars, originally perhaps the protector of man, herds, and crops alike, becomes—it may be even before Greek influence is brought to bear upon him—the deity of warriors and war-horses, of the yearly renewed strength of a struggling community[[1090]]. It is looking with modern eyes at the institution of an old world if we try to separate the Roman warrior from the Roman husbandman, or the warlike aspect of his god from his universal care for his people.
xiv Kal. Nov. (October 19). NP.
ARM[ILUSTRIUM]. (ARV. SAB. MAFF. AMIT. ANT.)
The first three letters of this word, which alone appear in the calendars, are explained by Varro and Verrius: ‘Armilustrium ab eo quod in armilustrio armati sacra faciunt ... ab ludendo aut lustro, quod circumibant ludentes ancilibus armati[[1091]].’ This passage may be taken as referring both to March 19 and Oct. 19, and as showing that the Salii with the sacred shields were active on both days. This can also be inferred from the fact that in 190 B.C. a Roman army, on its march into Asia, had to halt at the Hellespont, ‘quia dies forte, quibus ancilia moventur. religiosi ad iter inciderant’[[1092]]—its commander Scipio being one of the Salii. It can be shown that this was in the autumn, as the army did not leave Italy till July 15[[1093]]. It may be taken as certain, then, that this was the last day on which the Salii appeared, and that arma and ancilia were now purified[[1094]], and put away for the winter.