to the meaning of the festivals or the gods concerned in them, and his ideas as to the agricultural features of the months July, August, December seem to me doubtful; but the paper is one that all students of the calendar must reckon with. 15. Marquardt, Privatleben, pp. 459 and 569 foll. Revue des études ethno 16. For the festivals mentioned in the following paragraphs see R.F., s.v., and Wissowa, R.K., section 63. 17. "St. George and the Parilia," in graphiques et sociologiques for Jan. 1908. this admirable study to the kindness of its author. 18. Frazer, G.B. ii. 318 foll. I owe my knowledge of 19. Varro, L.L. v. 64, says, "Ab satu dictus Saturnus." And in Augustine (Civ. Dei, vi. 8) he is quoted as holding the opinion "quod pertineat Saturnus ad semina, quae in terram de qua oriuntur iterum recidunt." He was probably the numen of the seedsowing (Saeturnus), and as his festival comes after the end of sowing, we may presume that he was the numen of the sown as well as of the unsown seed. In the article "Saturnus" in Roscher's Lexicon, which has appeared since the above note was written, Wissowa provisionally accepts Varro's etymology. 20. Festus, p. 245a, "Publica sacra quae publico sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis, curiis, sacellis." article "Sacra" in Dict. of Antiqq. ii. 577. See 21. "Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a perfect autocracy" (Select Charters, Introduction, p. 19). 22. The annalists believed that the publication first took place in the year 304 B.C.: Livy ix. 46. Mommsen (Chronologie, p. 31) thought it possible that it had already been done by the Decemvirs in one of the two last of the XII. Tables, but again withdrawn. The object of keeping the Fasti secret was, of course, to control the times available for legal and political business. 23. This paragraph is abridged from a passage in the author's paper in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 848. 24. See Anthropology and the Classics (Oxford, 1908), p. 44. 25. R.F. p. 241 foll. 26. Wissowa holds that it dates from the third century B.C.: Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to refute this view in the Classical Review for 1902, p. 115 foll., and Dr. Wissowa criticised my criticism in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen, It is dealt with at length in R.F. p. 111 foll. See below, P. 222. 27. This is not exactly the view expressed in R.F. p. 315 foll., where I was inclined to adopt that of Mannhardt that the laughing symbolised the return to life after sacrificial death. I am now disposed to think of it as parallel with the ecstasy of the Pythoness and other inspired priests, or the shivering and convulsive movements which denote that a human being is "possessed" by a god or spirit. See Jevons, Introduction, p. 174. Mannhardt's view seems, however, to gain support from Pausanias' description of the ordeal he underwent himself at the cave of Trophonius, after which he could laugh again: Paus. ix. 39. See also Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 580. Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 501. 28. R.F. p. 109; Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll. Ovid's account is of a private rite in the house, as elsewhere he tells us of things done by private persons on festival days. We do not know whether there was any public ritual for these days. For further discussion of the contrast between the two festivals of the dead, see below, Lect. XVII. p. 393. 29. G.B. iii. 138 foll. The attempt to connect the so-called Saturnalia of the army of the Danube in the third century A.D. with the early practice of Roman Saturnalia seems to me to fail entirely, even after reading Prof. Cumont's paper in the Revue de philologie, 1897, p. 133 foll. I should imagine that Cumont would now admit that the Saturn who was sacrificed on the Danube as described in the Martyrdom of St. Dasius must have been of Oriental origin, and that the soldiers concerned were in no sense Roman or Italian. For the hellenisation of the Saturnalia, see Wissowa in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. Saturnus," p. 432. Wissowa, I may note, does not believe in the accuracy of the account of the " Martyrdom." 66 30. Nothing, that is, in the regular ritual of the Roman Stateexcept in so far as the killing of a criminal who was sacer to a god can be so regarded; and the only instance of any kind that can be quoted is that of the two pairs of Gaulish and Greek men and women who in the stress of the second Punic war and afterwards were buried alive, as it was said, in the Forum Boarium. Wissowa, R.K. p. 355 and notes. I shall return to this in Lecture XIV. 31. The earliest mention of the slaying of a victim (bestiarius) to Jupiter is in Minucius Felix, Octav. 22 and 30, i.e. towards the end of the second century A.D. or even later. Cp. Tertull. Apol. 9, Lactantius i. 21. I do not go so far as to say with Wissowa (p. 109, note 3) that this story is " ganz gewiss apokryph," but I take it as simply a case of degeneracy under the influence of the amphitheatre and of Orientalism. 32. For Numa see Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 551 foll. 33. See Dr. Frazer's most recent account of this subject, in his Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, chaps. iii.-v. Prof. Ridgeway's idea that the Flamen Dialis was really a Numan institution is of course simply impossible, and the arguments he founds on it fall to the ground. Ovid, probably reflecting Varro, speaks of the Flamen Dialis as belonging to the Pelasgian religion, which at least means that he was aware of the extreme antiquity of the office; Fasti, ii. 281. Dr. Döllinger (The Gentile and the Jew, vol. ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see in this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of ceremonial ordinances." 34. He was sui iuris (Gaius i. 130), as soon as he was chosen or taken (captus) by the Pontifex maximus; but he was subject to the authority of the P.M., like all the other flamines and the Vestals. See Wissowa, R.K. p. 438; Tac. Ann. iv. 16. LECTURE VI THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP WE must now turn our attention to what is the most difficult part of our subject, the ideas of the early Romans about "the Power manifesting itself in the universe." In my first lecture I indicated in outline what the difficulties are which beset us all through our studies; they are in no part of it so insurmountable as in this. Material fails us, because there was no contemporary literature; because the Romans were not a thinking people, and probably thought very little about the divine beings whom they propitiated; and again, because comparative religion, as it is called, is of scant value in such a study. We have to try and get rid of our own ideas about God or gods, to keep our minds free of Greek ideas and mythology, and, in fact, to abstain from bringing the ideas of any other peoples to bear upon the question until we are pretty sure that we have some sort of understanding of those Roman ideas with which we are tempted to compare them. first duty of the student of any system of religion is to study that religion in and by itself. As M. S. Reinach observed in an address at the Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford, it is time that we began to attend to differences as well as similarities; and this can only be done by the conscientious use of such materials as are available for the study of each particular religion. The The only materials available in the case of the earliest Rome are (1) the calendar which I was explaining in the last lecture, which gives us the names of the festivals of the religious year; (2) the names of the deities concerned in these festivals, so far as we know them from later additions to the calendar, from Roman literature, and from evidence, chiefly epigraphical, of the names of deities among kindred Italian peoples; (3) the fragments of information, now most carefully collected and sifted, about what the Romans did in the worship of their deities. The names and order of the festivals, the names of the deities themselves, the cult, or detail of worship, including priesthoods and holy places,-these are the only real materials we possess, and our only safe guides. To trust to legends is fatal, because such legends as there were in Italy were never written down until the Greeks turned their attention to them, colouring them with their own fancy and with reminiscences of their own mythology. For example, no sane investigator would now make use of the famous story told by Ovid and Plutarch about Numa's interview with Jupiter, and the astute way in which he deceived the god, as an illustration of the Roman's ideas of the divine; we know that it can be traced back to the greatest liar among all Roman annalists,' that it was in part derived from a Greek story, and in part invented to explain a certain piece of ritual, the procuratio fulminis. Even what was done in the cult must be handled with knowledge and discretion. Dr. Frazer has a theory that the Roman kings personated Jupiter, and uses as evidence of this the fact that in the triumph the triumphator was dressed after the fashion of the statue of the god in the Capitoline temple, with his face reddened with minium: forgetting that the temple, its cult and its statue, all date from the very end of the period of the kingship, and were the work of an Etruscan monarch, almost beyond doubt. There may be truth in his theory, but this is not the way to prove it; this is not the way to arrive at a true understanding of Roman religious ideas. What did the old Romans know about the nature of the objects of their worship? All religion is in its development a process of gaining such knowledge: if it |