the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.

28. e.g. Tylor, article "Magic" in Encycl. Brit., and Primitive Culture, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, Threshold of Religion, 83. See below, p. 180.

29. Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons, Anthropology and the Classics, P. 93 foll.

30. Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, note on this passage. 31. Civ. Dei, viii. 19.

32. See, eg., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.

33. The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.

34. Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.

35. The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii. 36. Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.

37. Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.

38. Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.

39. See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll. 40. Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.

41. Frazer, G.B. i. 345, note 2, where we learn that gold was taboo in some Greek worships, eg. at the mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of such potency as medicine, and among them its application to children who have been poisoned.

42. Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 39.

43. See an article by the author on the original meaning of the toga praetexta in Classical Review, vol. x. (1896) p. 317.

44. For the Compitalia, Macrob. i. 7. 34; Festus p. 238. For the Paganalia, Probus, ad Georg. ii. 385, assuming the feriae Sementinae

there mentioned to be the Paganalia (see R.F. p. 294). For the feriae Latinae, Festus, s.v. "oscillantes."

45. Wissowa, R.K. p. 193, with whose view I entirely agree. We learn of the imaginary goddess from Varro, L.L. ix. 61. Pais, I may remark in passing, is certain that Acca Larentia was the mater Larum; see his Lectures on Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 60 foll.

46. Wissowa, R.K. p. 354, note 5.

47. Georg. ii. 380 foll. It is not certain that Virgil is describing the festival generally known as Paganalia, which took place early in January; but it seems probable from line 382 that he is thinking of some festival of the pagus. The oscilla may have been used at

more than one.

48. Note that Virgil writes of masks used in rude play-acting, as well as of oscilla hung on trees, and conjoins the two as though they had something in common. The evidence of an engraved onyx cup in the Louvre, of which a cut is given in the article "Oscilla" in the Dict. of Antiquities, seems to make it probable that masks worn by rustics on these occasions were afterwards hung by them on trees as oscilla. Some of these masks on the cup are adorned with horns, which may explain an interesting passage of Apuleius (Florida, i. 1) : "neque enim iustius religiosam moram viatori obiecerit aut ara floribus redimita . . . aut quercus cornibus onerata, aut fagus pellibus coronata," etc. See also Gromatici veteres, ii. 241.

He

49. See, however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted of the maniae and pilae.

50. Magic in the old forms, or many of them, has survived not only into the old Roman religion, but to the present day, in many parts of Italy. "The peasants have recourse to the priests and the saints on great occasions, but they use magic all the time for everything," was said by a woman of the Romagna Toscana to the late C. G. Leland (Etruscan Roman Remains, Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it has received. The author may have been uncritical, but beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia religione" contains much that has come down direct from pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's remarkable book on Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion may tempt some really qualified investigator to undertake a similar work in Italy before it is too late.

LECTURE IV

THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY

SOME of the survivals mentioned in the last two lectures seem to carry us back to a condition of culture anterior to the family and to the final settlement on the land. Some attempt has recently been made to discover traces of descent by the mother in early Latium; if this could be proved, it would mean that the Latins were already in Latium before they had fully developed the patriarchal system on which the family is based. However this may be, the first real fact that meets us in the religious experience of the Romans is the attitude towards the supernatural, or "the Power that manifests itself in the Universe," of the family as settled down upon the land. The study of religion in the family, as we know it in historical times, is also that of the earliest organisation of religion, and of the most permanent type of ancient Italian religious thought. Aust, whose book on the Roman religion is the most masterly sketch of the subject as yet published, writes thus of this religion of the family: "Here the limits of religion and superstition vanish. and in vain we seek here for the boundary marks of various epochs." By the first of these propositions he means that the State has not here been at work, framing a ius divinum, including religion and excluding magic; in the family, magic of all kinds would be admissible alongside of the daily worship of the family deities, and thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid

2

regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State. Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into its worship: 3 new deities do not find their way in—the family experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such degree as to affect its vitality.1

But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe (populus) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, gentes, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor. According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the patria potestas of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion, as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or unnaturalness of death." In regard to the kinship of a clan, death at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.

Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the process, whether or no it has smaller divisions

within it. We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die. Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.

It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the gens comprising the living descendants of a living ancestor, whether of two, three, or even four generations. This union, clearly visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other, and is known by the word familia. This famous word, so far as we know, does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement, and is therefore essentially das Hauswesen, the house itself, with the persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much thought about the past, or indeed