(2) Another point which comes out distinctly—unless our Roman authorities were wholly misled—is the woodland character of the Fauni. A passage of Varro, of which I quoted the first words just now, goes on thus: ‘hos versibus quos vocant Saturnios in silvestribus locis traditum est solitos fari futura, a quo fando Faunos dictos.’ This seems to be a genuine Italian tradition. Virgil was not talking Greek when he wrote[[1136]]
Haec nemora indigenae Fauni Nymphaeque tenebant
Gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata,
Queis neque mos neque cultus erat, &c.
The poet imagines an ancient race, sprung from the trees themselves: a ‘genus indocile et dispersum montibus altis,’ living on the forest-clad hills[[1137]], to whom foreign invaders brought the means of civilization. Why should not this tradition be a native one? It is singularly in accord with the most recent results of Italian excavation; for it is now absolutely certain that the oldest inhabitants of central Italy dwelt on the hill-tops, and that the first traces of foreign influence only occur in lower and later settlements[[1138]]. The valleys were still undrained and malarious. These earliest inhabitants who have left their traces for the excavator, or a still older race scattered on the hills after their invasion, may have been the traditional representatives of what Preller has called ‘the period of Faunus[[1139]],’ regarded by the later civilization, from their wild and woodland habits, as half demons and half men. The name of the kindred Silvanus tells its own tale; and his actual connexion with trees was even closer than that of Faunus[[1140]].
(3) A third well-attested point is the attribution to Faunus or the Fauni of power for good or evil over the crops and herds, as we have seen it already implied in Horace’s ode. Porphyrion[[1141]] in his commentary on this ode tells us that Faunus, on the Nones of December, wishes the cattle, which are under his protection, to be free from danger. Just before this passage he had spoken of him as ‘deum inferum et pestilentem,’ thus giving us the dark and hurtful side of his power as well as the bright and gracious. The same combination of the powers of doing and averting harm is seen in Mars, as we have already learnt from the hymn of the Arval Brethren and the formula of prayers preserved by Cato[[1142]].
Under this head may be mentioned the belief that both Faunus and Silvanus were dangerous for women, an idea which finds expression in the significant word incubus, so often applied to them[[1143]]. We may perhaps find a reason for the identification of Faunus as god of the Lupercalia in the most striking feature of the festival—the pursuit of the women by the creppi, who struck them with thongs in order to render them productive[[1144]].
(4) The last characteristic of the Fauni to be noticed is that they had the power of foretelling the future. The verse of Ennius already quoted is the earliest literary evidence we have of this; but the quaint story of the capture of Picus and Faunus by Numa[[1145]], who caught them by making them drunk with wine at the fountain where they came to drink, and compelled them as the price of their liberty to reveal the art of staying a disaster, has an unmistakeable old-Italian ring. The idea seems to have been, not that Faunus was a ‘god of prophecy,’ as Preller seems to fancy, but that there was an ancient race of Fauni, who might be coaxed or compelled to reveal secrets. Sometimes indeed they ‘spoke’ of their own accord; when a Roman army needed to be warned or encouraged on its march, their voice was heard by all as it issued from thicket or forest. Cicero and Livy[[1146]] write of these voices with a distinctness which (as it seems to me) admits of no suspicion that they are inserting Greek ideas into Roman annals.
There are also traces to be found of a belief in the existence of local woodland oracles of Faunus and his kind. It was in a grove sacred to Faunus that Numa, in Ovid’s vivid description[[1147]], slew two sheep, the one to Faunus, the other to Sleep, and after twice sprinkling water on his head, and twice wreathing it with beech-leaves, stretched himself on the fleeces to receive the prophetic inspiration as he slumbered. Almost every touch in this story seems to me to be genuine; and especially the conditions necessary to success—the continence of the devotee, and the removal of the metal ring from the finger. Virgil, with something more of foreign adornment, tells in exquisite verse what is really the same story as Ovid’s[[1148]]. And a later poet writes of a sacred beech-grove, where under like conditions of temperance, &c., the shepherds might find the oracles of Faunus inscribed on the bark of a beech-tree[[1149]]. All this reminds us of Dodona and the oldest Greek oracles: we have here the quaint methods of primitive shepherds, appealing to prophetic powers localized in particular woodland spots. Roman exigencies of state drew by degrees the whole of the secrets of fore-knowledge into the hands of a priestly aristocracy, with its fixed doctrine and methods of divination; but the country folk long retained their faith in the existence of an ancient race, possessed of prophetic power, which haunted forest and mountain.
These four points, taken together, i. e. the multiplicity of the Fauni, their woodland character, and their supposed powers of productivity and prophecy, seem by no means to exclude the possibility of the human origin suggested long ago by Scaliger, and recently by Prof. Nettleship, though I would shape the explanation somewhat differently. Wild men from the hills and woods, for example, might well be supposed to be possessed of supernatural powers, like the gipsies of modern times[[1150]]. And the striking absence of any epigraphical survivals of a definite cult may possibly be explained by a persistence of the belief in the Italian mind that Faunus was never really and truly a god, but one of a race with some superhuman attributes—a link in the chain that always in antiquity connected together the human and the divine. Horace’s ode shows the divine element predominating; some local Faunus has, so to speak, been caught and half deified; and yet, even then, the process is hardly complete.