Part 14

On the name of the mensis Junius some remarks have already been made under May 1. There is no sure ground for connecting it with Juno[505]. The first day of June was sacred to her, but so were all Kalends; and if this was also the _dies natalis_ of the temple of Juno Moneta _in arce_, we have no reason to suppose the choice of day to be specially significant[506]. We know the date of this dedication; it was in 344 B.C. and in consequence of a vow made by L. Furius Camillus Dictator in a war against the Aurunci[507]. Of a Juno Moneta of earlier date we have no knowledge; and, in spite of much that has been said to the contrary, I imagine that the title was only given to a Juno of the _arx_ in consequence of the popular belief that the Capitol was saved from the attack of the Gauls (390 B.C.) by the warning voices of her sacred geese. What truth there was in that story may be a matter of doubt, but it seems easier to believe that it had a basis of fact than to account for it aetiologically[508]. There may well have been an altar or _sacellum_[509] of Juno on the _arx_, near which her noisy birds were kept[510]; and when a temple was eventually built here in 344 B.C., it was appropriately dedicated to Juno of the warning voice. From the fact that part of this temple was used as a mint[511], the word _Moneta_ gradually passed into another sense, which has found its way into our modern languages[512].

One tradition connected the name of the month with M. Junius Brutus, who is said to have performed a _sacrum_ on this day after the flight of Tarquinius, on the Caelian Hill[513]. This _sacrum_ had no connexion with Juno, and the tradition which thus absurdly brings Brutus into the question shows plainly that the derivation from Juno was not universally accepted[514]. The real deity of the Kalends of June was not Juno, but an antique goddess whose antiquity is attested both by the meagreness of our knowledge of her, and the strange confusion about her which Ovid displays. Had Carna been more successful in the struggle for existence of Roman deities, we might not have been so sure of her extreme antiquity; but no foreign cult grafted on her gave her a new lease of life, and by the end of the Republic she was all but dead.

What little we do know of her savours of the agricultural life and folk-lore of the old Latins. Her sacrifices were of bean-meal and lard[515]; and this day went by the name of Kalendae fabariae[516], ‘quia hoc mense adultae fabae divinis rebus adhibentur.’ The fact was that it was the time of bean-harvest[517]; and beans, as we have already seen, were much in request for sacred purposes. ‘Maximus honos fabae,’ says Pliny[518], alluding to the value of the bean as food, to its supposed narcotic power, and its use in religious ritual. We have already found beans used in the cult of the dead and the ejection of ghosts from the house[519]; and Prof. Wissowa has of late ingeniously conjectured that this day (June 1) was concerned with rites of the same kind[520]. He quotes an inscription, a will in which a legacy is left ‘ut rosas Carnar[iis] ducant’[521]. Undoubtedly the reference here is to rites of the dead (cf. Rosalia), and Mommsen may be right in suggesting that by Carnar[iis] is meant the Kalends of June. But it is going a little too far to argue on this slender evidence, even if we add to it the fact that the day was _nefastus_, that the festival of Carna was of the same kind as the Parentalia, Rosalia, &c.; a careful reading of Ovid’s comments seems to show that there were curious survivals of folk-lore connected with the day and with Carna which cannot all be explained by reference to rites of the dead.

Ovid does indeed at once mislead his readers by identifying Carna and Cardea, and thus making the former the deity of door-hinges, and bringing her into connexion with Janus[522]. But we may guess that he does this simply because he wants to squeeze in a pretty folk-tale of Janus and Cardea, for which his readers may be grateful, and which need not deceive them. When he writes of the ritual of Carna[523]—our only safe guide—he makes it quite plain that he is mixing up the attributes of two distinct deities. He brings the two together by contriving that Janus, as a reward to Cardea for yielding to his advances, should bestow on her not only the charge of _cardines_, but also that of protecting infants from the _striges_[524], creatures of the nature of vampires, but described by Ovid as owls, who were wont to suck their blood and devour their vitals. But this last duty surely belonged to Carna, of whom Macrobius says ‘Hanc deam vitalibus humanis praeesse credunt’: and thus Carna’s attribute is conjoined with Cardea’s. The lines are worth quoting in which Ovid describes the charms which are to keep off the _striges_, for as preserving a remnant of old Italian folk-lore they are more interesting than the doubtful nature of an obscure deity[525]:

Protinus arbutea[526] postes ter in ordine tangit Fronde, ter arbutea limina fronde notat: Spargit aquis aditus—et aquae medicamen habebant— Extaque de porca cruda bimenstre tenet[527]. Atque ita ‘noctis aves, extis puerilibus’ inquit ‘Parcite: pro parvo victima parva cadit. Cor pro corde, precor, pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.’ Sic ubi libavit, prosecta sub aethere ponit, Quique adsint sacris, respicere illa vetat[528]. Virgaque Ianalis de spina ponitur alba[529] Qua lumen thalamis parva fenestra dabat. Post illud nec aves cunas violasse feruntur, Et rediit puero qui fuit ante color.

Having told his folk-tale and described his charms, Ovid returns to Carna, and asks why people eat bean-gruel on the Kalends of June, with the rich fat of pigs. The answer is that the cult of Carna is of ancient date, and that the healthy food of man in early times is retained in it[530].

Sus erat in pretio; caesa sue festa colebant. Terra fabas tantum duraque farra dabat. Quae duo mixta simul sextis quicunque Kalendis Ederit, huic laedi viscera posse negant.

This was undoubtedly the real popular belief—that by eating this food on Carna’s day your digestion was secured for the year. Macrobius[531] makes the practice into a much more definite piece of ritual. ‘_Prayers_ are offered to this goddess,’ he says, ‘for the good preservation of liver, heart, and the other internal organs of our bodies. Her _sacrifices_ are bean-meal and lard, because this is the best food for the nourishment of the body.’ Ovid is here the genuine Italian, Macrobius the scholar and theologian: both may be right.

Whatever, then, may be the meaning or etymology of the name Carna, we may at least be sure that the cult belongs to the age of ancient Latin agriculture[532], since it was in connexion with her name that the popular belief survived in Ovid’s time of the virtue of bean-eating on the Kalends of June.

We learn from Ovid (line 191) that this same day was the _dies natalis_ of the temple of Mars _extra portam Capenam_, i. e. on the Via Appia—a favourite spot for the mustering of armies, and the starting-point for the yearly _transvectio equitum_[533]. I have already alluded to the baseless fabric of conjecture built on the conjunction of Mars and Juno on this day[534]; and need here only repeat that in no well-attested Roman myth is Mars the son of Juno, or Juno the wife of Jupiter. And it is even doubtful whether June 1 was the _original_ dedication-day of this temple of Mars: the Venusian calendar does not mention it, and Ovid may be referring to a re-dedication by Augustus[535]. There is absolutely no ground for the myth-making of Usener and Roscher about Mars and Juno: but it is to the credit of the latter that he has inserted in his article on Mars a valuable note by Aust, in which his own conclusions are cogently controverted.

III. NON. IUN. (JUNE 3). C.

BELLON[AE] IN CIRC[O] FLAM[INIO]. (VEN.)

This temple was vowed by the Consul Ap. Claudius in an Etruscan war[536] (296 B.C.): the date of dedication is unknown. In front of the temple was an area of which the truly Roman story is told[537], that being unable to declare war with Pyrrhus with the orthodox ritual of the _fetiales_, as he had no land in Italy into which they could throw the challenging spear[538], they caught a Pyrrhan soldier and made him buy this spot to suit their purpose. Here stood the ‘columella’ from which henceforward the spear was thrown[539].

The temple became well known as a suitable meeting-place for the Senate outside the _pomoerium_, when it was necessary to do business with generals and ambassadors who could not legally enter the city[540]. But of the goddess very little is known. There is no sufficient reason to identify her with that Nerio with whom we made acquaintance in March, as is done too confidently by the writer of the article in Roscher’s _Lexicon_[541].

PRID. NON. IUN. (JUNE 4). C.

HERC[ULI] MAGN[O] CUSTO[DI]. (VEN.)

SACRUM HERCULI. (RUST.)

This temple also was near the Circus Flaminius[542]. It was a foundation of Sulla’s, 82 B.C., and the cult was Greek, answering to that of Ἡρακλῆς ἀλεξίκακος[543].

NON. IUN. (JUNE 5). N.[544]

DIO FIDIO IN COLLE. (VEN.)

The temple on the Quirinal of which this was the _dies natalis_ is said by Dionysius[545] to have been vowed by Tarquinius Superbus, and dedicated by Sp. Postumius in B.C. 466. But that there was a _fanum_ or _sacellum_ of this deity on or near the same site at a much earlier time is almost certain; such a _sacellum_ ‘ad portam Sanqualem’ is mentioned, also by Dionysius[546], as ἱερὸν Διὸς Πιστίου, and we know that in many cases the final _aedes_ or _templum_ was a development from an uncovered altar or sacred place.

Dius Fidius, as the adjectival character of his name shows, was a genuine old Italian religious conception, but one that in historical times was buried almost out of sight. Among gods and heroes there has been a struggle for existence, as among animals and plants; with some peoples a struggle between indigenous and exotic deities, in which the latter usually win the day, and displace or modify the native species[547]. What laws, if any, govern this struggle for existence it is not possible to discern clearly; the result is doubtless the survival of the fittest, if by the fittest we understand those which flourish best under the existing conditions of society and thought; but it would hardly seem to be the survival of those which are most beneficial to the worshipping race. Among the Romans the fashionable exotic deities of the later Republic and Empire had no such ethical influence on the character of the people as those older ones of the type of Dius Fidius, who in historical times was known to the ordinary Roman only through the medium of an old-fashioned oath.

Ovid knows very little about Dius Fidius[548]:

Quaerebam Nonas Sanco Fidione referrem, An tibi, Semo pater: cum mihi Sancus ait ‘Cuicunque ex illis dederis, ego munus habebo; Nomina trina fero, sic voluere Cures.’

He finds three names for the deity, but two would have sufficed; the only individual Semo known to us is Sancus himself. The Semones, so far as we can guess, were spirits of the ‘pandaemonic’ age, nameless like the Lares with whom they are associated in the hymn of the Fratres Arvales[549]; but one only, Semo Sancus, seems to have taken a name and survived into a later age, and this one was identified with Dius Fidius. Aelius Stilo, the Varro of the seventh century A. U. C., seems to have started this identification[550]. Varro does not comment on it; but Verrius accepted it: he writes of an ‘aedes Sancus, qui deus Dius Fidius vocatur’[551]. The evidence of inscriptions is explicit for a later period; an altar, for example, found near the supposed site of his temple on the Quirinal, bears the inscription ‘Sanco Sancto Semon[i] deo fidio sacrum’[552]. And there is nothing in the words Sancus and Fidius to forbid the identification, for both point to the same class of ideas—that of the bond which religious feeling places on men in their duties to, and contracts with, each other. They are in fact two different names for the same religious conception. It is interesting to find them both occurring in the great processional inscription of Iguvium in Umbria: Fisus or Fisovius Sancius, who is there invoked next after Jupiter, seems to unite the two deities in a single name[553]. This conjunction would seem to save us from the necessity of discussing the question whether Sancus, as has often been insisted on by scholars both ancient and modern[554], was really the Sabine form of Dius Fidius; for if in Umbria the two are found together, as at Rome, there is no reason why the same should not have been the case throughout central Italy. The question would never have been asked had the fluid nature of the earliest Italian deities and the adjectival character of their names been duly taken account of. We are all of us too apt to speak of this primitive spirit-world in terms of a later polytheistic theology, and to suppose that the doubling of a name implies some distinction of origin or race.

Dius Fidius, then, and Semo Sancus are both Latin names for the same religious conception, the impersonality of which caused it to lose vitality as new and anthropomorphic ideas of the divine came into vogue at Rome. But there is at least some probability that it survived in a fashion under the name of an intruder, Hercules; and the connexion with Hercules will show, what we might already have guessed, that the religious conception we are speaking of was very near akin to that of Jupiter himself.

There is clear evidence that the best Roman scholars identified not only Dius Fidius with Semo Sancus, but both of these with Hercules. Varro, in a passage already quoted, tells us that Stilo believed Dius Fidius to be the Sabine Sancus and the Greek Hercules; Verrius Flaccus, if his excerptors represent him rightly, in two separate glosses identified all these three[555].

Again, the Roman oaths _me dius fidius_ and _me hercule_ are synonymous; that the former was the older can hardly be doubted, and the latter must have come into vogue when the Greek oath by Heracles became familiar. Thus the origin of _me hercule_ must be found in a union of the characteristics of Hercules with those of the native Dius Fidius. It is worth noting that in pronouncing both these oaths it was the custom to go out into the open air[556]. Here is a point at which both Hercules and Dius Fidius seem to come into line with Jupiter; for the most solemn oath of all was _per Iovem_ (_lapidem_), also taken under the light of heaven[557], as was the case with the oath at the altar of Ζεὺς Ἑρκεῖος in Greece[558]. Yet another point of conjunction is the _ara maxima_ at the entrance to the Circus Maximus, which was also a place where oaths were taken and treaties ratified[559]; this was the altar of Hercules Victor, to whom the tithes of spoil were offered; and this was also associated with the legend of Hercules and Cacus. In the deity by whom oaths were sworn, and in the deity of the tithes and the legend, it is now acknowledged on all hands that we should recognize a great Power whom we may call Dius Fidius, or Semo Sancus, or the Genius Iovius, or even Jupiter himself[560]. Tithes, oaths, and the myth of the struggle of light with darkness, cannot be associated with such a figure as the Hercules who came to Italy from Greece; tithes are the due of some great god, or lord of the land[561], oaths are taken in the presence of the god of heaven, and the great nature myth only descends by degrees to attach itself to semi-human figures.

We are here indeed in the presence of very ancient Italian religious ideas, which we can only very dimly apprehend, and for the explanation of which—so far as explanation is possible—there is not space in this work. But before we leave Dius Fidius, I will briefly indicate the evidence on which we may rest our belief (1) that as Semo Sancus, he is connected with Jupiter as the god of the heaven and thunder; and (2) that as Hercules he is closely related to the same god as seen in a different aspect.

1. In the Iguvian inscription referred to above Sancius in one place appears in conjunction with Iovius[562]; and, as we have seen, it is also found in the same ritual with Fisu or Fisovius. In this same passage of the inscription (which is a manual of ritual for the Fratres Attidii, an ancient religious brotherhood of Iguvium), the priest is directed to have in his hand an _urfita_ (_orbita_), i. e. either disk or globe; and this _urfita_ has been compared[563], not without reason, with the _orbes_ mentioned by Livy[564] as having been made of brass after the capture of Privernum and placed in the temple of Semo Sancus. If we may safely believe that such symbols occur chiefly in the worship of deities of sun and heaven, as seems probable, we have here some evidence, however imperfect, for the common origin of Sancus and Jupiter.

Again, there was in Roman augural lore a bird called _sanqualis avis_, which can hardly be dissociated from the cult of Sancus; for there was also an ancient city gate, the porta Sanqualis, near the sacellum Sancus on the Quirinal[565]. Pliny’s language about this bird shows that this bit of ancient lore was almost lost in his time; but at the same time he makes it clear that it was believed to belong to the eagle family, which played such an important part in the science of augury. The only concrete fact that seems to be told us about this bird is that in B.C. 177 one struck with its beak a sacred stone at Crustumerium—a stone, it would seem, that had fallen from heaven, i. e. a thunder-stone or a meteorite[566].

Bearing this in mind, we are not surprised to find further traces of a connexion between Sancus and thunderbolts. There was at Rome a _decuria_ of _sacerdotes bidentales_, in close association with the cult of Sancus. Three votive altars are extant, dedicated to the god by this _decuria_[567]; two of them were found on the Quirinal, close to the site of the sacellum Sancus. Now the meaning of the word _bidental_ shows that the _decuria_ had as its duty the care of the sacred spots which had been struck by thunderbolts; such a spot, which was also called _puteal_ from its resemblance to a well fenced with a circular wall, bore the name _bidental_, presumably because two-year-old sheep (_bidentes_) were sacrificed there[568]. Consequently we again have Sancus brought into connexion with the augural lore of lightning, which made it a religious duty to bury the bolt, and fence off the spot from profane intrusion. Yet another step forward in this dim light. A _bidental_ was one kind of _templum_, as we are expressly told[569]; and the temple of Sancus itself seems to have had this peculiarity. Varro says that its roof was _perforatum_, so that the sky might be seen through it[570]. In a fragment of augural lore, apparently genuine though preserved by a writer of late date, the _caeli templum_ seems to have been conceived as a dome, or a ball (_orbis_) cut in half, _with a hole in the top_[571]. We may allow that we are here getting out of our depth; but the general result of what has been put forward is that Sancus = Dius Fidius was originally a spirit or _numen_ of the heaven, and a wielder of the lightning, closely allied to the great Jupiter, whose cult, combined with that of Hercules, had almost obliterated him in historical times.

Finally, it would seem that those moral attributes of Jupiter which give him a unique position in the Roman theology as the god of truth, order, and concord, belonged at one period also to Sancus as Dius Fidius; for in his temple was kept the most ancient treaty of which the Romans knew, that said to have been made by Tarquinius Superbus with Gabii, which Dionysius must himself have seen[572], and which he describes as consisting of a wooden _clypeus_, bound with the hide of a sacrificed ox, and bearing ancient letters. Here also was the reputed statue of Gaia Caecilia or Tanaquil, the ideal Roman matron; of which it has been conjectured, rashly perhaps, but by an authority of weight, that it really represented a humanized female form of Dius Fidius, standing to him as the Junones of women stood to the Genii of men, or as Juno in the abstract to Genius in the abstract[573].

2. The last sentence of the preceding paragraph may aptly bring us to our second point, viz. the relation to Jupiter of Dius Fidius as = Hercules. Those who read the article ‘Dius Fidius’ in Roscher’s _Lexicon_ will be struck by the fact that so cautious a writer as Professor Wissowa should boldly identify this deity, at the very outset of his account, with the ‘Genius Iovis’; and this conjecture, which is not his own, but rather that of the late Professor Reifferscheid of Breslau[574], calls for a word of explanation.

More than thirty years ago Reifferscheid published a paper in which he compared certain points in the cults of Juno and Hercules, of which we have a meagre knowledge from Roman literature, with some works of art of Etruscan or ancient Italian origin (i. e. not Greek), and found that they seemed to throw new and unexpected light on each other.

The Roman women, we are told[575], did not swear by Hercules, but by ‘their Juno’; the men swore by Hercules, Dius Fidius, or by their Genius[576]. Women were excluded from the cult of Hercules at the ara maxima[577]; men were excluded, not indeed from the cult of Juno, but (as Reifferscheid puts it) ‘from that of Bona Dea, who was not far removed from Juno[578].’ At the birth of a child, a couch (_lectus_) was spread in the _atrium_ for Juno, a _mensa_ for Hercules[579]. The bride’s girdle (_cingulum_) seems to have given rise to a cult-title of Juno, viz. Cinxia, while the knot in it which was loosed by the bridegroom at the _lectus genialis_ was called the _nodus herculaneus_[580].