able feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the mundus was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law, not of superstitio, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably means what is outside that religious law, outside the ius divinum; and it is a document of religio only so far as it is meant to organise and carry out the cura and caerimonia, the natural results of that feeling which the Romans called religio. It stands on exactly the same footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail with the cura and caerimonia, and rigidly excluded all foreign and barbarous rites and superstitions.

I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up the calendar as the fundamental charter of the ius divinum must have had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to the deities who were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception. The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims, which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the god (whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with him.27 They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal

28

settlers on the Palatine, and so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by means of beans,2 seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of the Golden Bough, is nothing more than the licence of the population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his familia; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever. There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the ius divinum was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded to; 30 it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged practice.31

Thus we may take it as highly probable that those who drew up the calendar had the deliberate intention of excluding from the State ritual, as far as was possible, everything in the nature of barbarism and magic. For the religious purposes of a people occupied in agriculture and war, and already beginning to develop some idea of law and order, there was no need of any religious rites except such as would serve, in decency and order,

to propitiate the deities concerned with the fertilisation of man, beast, and crop, and with the safety and efficacy of the host in its struggle with the enemies of the city. The Roman people grew up, in their city life as in the life of the family, in self-restraint, dignity, and good order, confident in the course of cura and caerimonia, itself decent and stately, if soulless, which the religious authorities had drawn up for them.

We should naturally like to know something about those authorities, who thus placed the religion of the State on a comparatively high level of ritualistic decency, if not of theological subtlety. The Romans themselves attributed the work to a priest-king, Numa Pompilius, and probably their instinct was a right one. Names matter little in such matters; but there is surely something in the universal Roman tradition of a great religious legislator, something too, it may be, in the tradition that he was a Sabine, a representative of the community on the Quirinal which had been embodied in the Roman city before the calendar was drawn up, and of the sturdy, serious stock of central Italy, which retained its virtus longer than any other Italian people. We are quite in the dark as to all this, unless we can put any kind of confidence in the traditional belief of the Romans themselves. But there is one point on which I should like to make a suggestion-a new one so far as I know. Numa was said to have been the first Flamen Dialis; but that is absolutely impossible, for the ancient taboos on that priesthood would have made become supreme legislator. who could hardly leave his leave the city, and was at restrictions on his activity,

it impossible for him to Evidently this Flamen, own house, might never every turn hedged in by was a survival of those

magician-kings who make rain and do other useful things, but would lose their power if they were exposed to certain contingencies; the number of possible contingencies increases till the unfortunate owner of the powers becomes powerless by virtue of the care SO

33

painfully taken of him.3 The priest of Jupiter and his taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber, he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where Jupiter was worshipped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.34

If there be any truth in this and I believe it to be a legitimate inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent state of taboo-then I think we may see a great religious change in the era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas. of the duty and destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman fashion, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kingship, but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.

NOTES TO LECTURE V.

1. Kornemann, op. cit. p. 87 ; Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. p. 790, note I. For the festival

of the Septimontium, Varro, L.L. vi. 24; Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 69; Fowler, R.F. p. 265 foll. This festival does not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi, sed montanorum modo " (Varro, l.c.). There are some interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's Evolution of the Aryan (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special reference to Rome,

2. Von Duhn in J.H.S. xvi. 126 foll. The latest research (Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Etrusker," p. 747) concludes that the arrival of the Etruscans on the west coast of Italy cannot be safely put earlier than the eighth century.

3. Hülsen - Jordan, Rom. Topogr. iii. 153. In a brief but masterly paper in the publications of the American School at Rome, 1908, p. 173 foll., J. B. Carter deals with the whole problem of the pomoerium and the pre-Servian city.

4. Wissowa, R.K. p. 27.

5. In C.I.L. i.2, p. 297 foll. See R.F. p. 14 foll.

6. See the Fasti in R.F. p. 21 foll.; or in Wissowa, R.K., at end of the book.

7. R.F. p. 38 foll. Marindin's article "Salii," Dict. of Antiqq., is very useful and sensible. There is little doubt that the dress and armour of the Salii represented that of the primitive Latin warrior, calculated to frighten away evil spirits as well as enemies, and that their dances in procession had some object of this kind. It is noticeable that there were two gilds or collegia of them belonging to the Palatine and Quirinal cities respectively; and they are also found at Tibur, Alba, Lanuvium, and other Latin cities.

8. Or 15th (Ides), according to the conjecture of Wissowa; see R.F. p. 44 and R.K. p. 131. It is almost incredible that this should originally have been on a day of even number, contrary to the universal rule of the Fasti.

9. See below, p. 212 foll., for further consideration of this socalled purification.

10. R.K. p. 131.

11. See below, p. 217.

12. R.K. p. 131.

13. Popular Religion and Folklore of India, ii. 51. For the sacredness of the number three and its multiples, see Diels, Sibyl linische Blätter, p. 40 foll.; but he limits it too much to chthonic religious ritual. See also H. Usener, "Dreizahl," in Rheinisches Museum, vol. 58, pp. 1 foll, 161 foll., and 321 foll. There is a summary of the results of these papers in Gruppe's Mythologische Literatur, 1898-1905, p. 360 foll. I may also refer to my friend Prof. Goudy's very interesting Trichotomy in Roman Law (Oxford, 1910), p. 8 foll.

14. By von Domaszewski in Archiv for 1907, p. 333 foll. The learned author's reasoning is often based on mere hypotheses as