Part 2
NP was not a mark in the pre-Julian calendars, for it was apparently unknown to Varro and Ovid. Verrius Flaccus seems to have distinguished it from N, but his explanation is mutilated, even as it survives in Festus[23]. No one has yet determined for certain the origin of the sign, and discussion of the various conjectures would be here superfluous[24]. It appears to distinguish, in the Julian calendars, those days on which fell the festivals of deities who were not of an earthly and therefore doubtful character from those marked N. Thus in the series of _dies nefasti_ in February and April the Ides in each case have the mark NP as being sacred to Jupiter.
EN. We have a mutilated note in the calendar of Praeneste which indicates what this abbreviation meant, viz. _endotercisus = intercisus_, i. e. ‘cut into parts’[25]. In morning and evening, as Varro tells us, the day was _nefastus_, but in the middle, between the slaying of the victim and the placing of the entrails upon the altar, it was _fastus_. But why eight days in the calendar were thus marked we do not know, and have no data for conjecturing. All the eight were days coming before some festival, or before the Ides. Of the eight two occur in January and two in February, the others in March, August, October and December. But on such facts no conjectures can be built.
Q.R.C.F. (_Quando Rex Comitiavit Fas_) will be explained under March 24; the only other day on which it occurs is May 24. Q.St.D.F. (_Quando stercus delatum fas_) only occurs on June 15, and will there be fully dealt with.
FP occurs thrice, but only in three calendars. Feb. 21 (_Feralia_) is thus marked in Caer.[26], but is F in Maff. April 23 (_Vinalia_) is FP in Caer. but NP in Maff. and F in Praen. Aug. 19 (_Vinalia rustica_) is FP in Maff. and Amit, F in Antiat. and Allif., NP in Vall. Mommsen explains FP as _fastus principio_, i. e. the early part of the day was _fastus_, and suggests that in the case of the _Feralia_, as the rites of the dead were performed at night, there was no reason why the earlier part of the day should be _nefastus_. But in the case of the two Vinalia we can hardly even guess at the meaning of the mark, and it does not seem to have been known to the Romans themselves.
V. The Calendars still surviving.
The basis of our knowledge of the old Roman religious year is to be found in the fragments of calendars which still survive. None of these indeed is older than the Julian era; and all but one are mere fragments. But from the fragments and the one almost perfect calendar we can infer the character of the earlier calendar with tolerable certainty.
The calendar, as the Romans generally believed, was first published by Cnaeus Flavius, curule aedile, in 304 B.C., who placed the _fasti_ conspicuously in the Forum, in order that every one might know on what days legal business might be transacted[27]; in other words, a calendar was published with the marks of the days and the indications of the festivals. After this we hear nothing until 189 B.C., when a consul, M. Fulvius Nobilior, adorned his temple of Hercules and the Muses with a calendar which contained explanations or notes as well as dates[28]. These are the only indications we have of the way in which the pre-Julian calendar was made known to the people.
But the rectification of the calendar by Julius, and the changes then introduced, brought about a multiplication of copies of the original one issued under the dictator’s edict[29]. Not only in Rome, but in the municipalities round about her, where the ancient religious usage of each city had since the enfranchisement of Italy been superseded, officially at least, by that of Rome, both public and private copies were made and set up either on stone, or painted on the walls or ceiling of a building.
Of such calendars we have in all fragments of some thirty, and one which is all but complete. Fourteen of these fragments were found in or near Rome, eleven in municipalities such as Praeneste, Caere, Amiternum, and others as far away as Allifae and Venusia; four are of uncertain origin[30]; and one is a curious fragment from Cisalpine Gaul[31]. Most of them are still extant on stone, but for a few we have to depend on written copies of an original now lost[32]. No day in the Roman year is without its annotation in one or more of these; the year is almost complete, as I have said, in the Fasti Maffeiani; and several others contain three or four months nearly perfect[33]. Two, though in a fragmentary condition, are of special interest. One of these, that of the ancient brotherhood of the Fratres Arvales, discovered in 1867 and following years in the grove of the brethren near Rome, contains some valuable additional notes in the fragments which survive of the months from August to November. The other, that of Praeneste, containing January, March, April and parts of February and December, is still more valuable from the comments it contains, most of which we can believe with confidence to have come from the hand of the great Augustan scholar Verrius Flaccus. We are told by Suetonius that Verrius put up a calendar in the forum at Praeneste[34], drawn up by his own hand; and the date[35] and matter of these fragments found at Praeneste agree with what we know of the life and writings of Verrius. It is unlucky that recent attempts to find additional fragments should have been entirely without result; for the whole annotated calendar, if we possessed it, would probably throw light on many dark corners of our subject.
To these fragments of Julian calendars, all drawn up between B.C. 31 and A.D. 46, there remain to be added two in MSS.: (i) that of Philocalus, A.D. 354, (ii) that of Polemius Silvius, A.D. 448; neither of which are of much value for our present purpose, though they will be occasionally referred to. Lastly, we have two farmer’s almanacs on cubes of bronze, which omit the individual days, but are of use as showing the course of agricultural operations under the later Empire[36].
All these calendars, some of which had been printed wholly or in part long ago, while a few have only been discovered of late, have been brought together for the first time in the first volume of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, edited by Mommsen with all his incomparable skill and learning, and furnished with ample elucidations and commentaries. And we now have the benefit of a second edition of this by the same editor, to whose labours in this as in every other department of Roman history it is almost impossible to express our debt in adequate words. All references to the calendars in the following pages will be made to this second edition.
A word remains to be said about the _Fasti_ of Ovid[37], which is a poetical and often fanciful commentary on the calendar of the first half of the Julian year, i.e. January to June inclusive; each month being contained in one book. Ovid tells us himself[38] that he completed the year in twelve books; but the last six were probably never published, for they are never quoted by later writers. The first six were written but not published before the poet’s exile, and taken in hand again after the death of Augustus, but only the first book had been revised when the work was cut short by Ovid’s death.
Ovid’s work merits all praise as a literary performance, for the neatness and felicity of its versification and diction; but as a source of knowledge it is too much of a medley to be used without careful criticism. There is, however, a great deal in it that helps us to understand the views about the gods and their worship, not only of the scholars who pleased themselves and Augustus by investigating these subjects, but also of the common people both in Rome and in the country. But the value varies greatly throughout the work. Where the poet describes some bit of ritual which he has himself seen, or tells some Italian story he has himself heard, he is invaluable; but as a substitute for the work of Varro on which he drew, he only increases our thirst for the original. No great scholar himself, he aimed at producing a popular account of the results of the work of scholars, picking and choosing here and there as suited his purpose, and not troubling himself to write with scientific accuracy. Moreover, he probably made free use of Alexandrine poets, and especially of Callimachus, whose _Aetia_ is in some degree his model for the whole poem; and thus it is that the work contains a large proportion of Greek myth, which is often hard to distinguish from the fragments of genuine Italian legend which are here and there imbedded in it. Still, when all is said, a student of the Roman religion should be grateful to Ovid; and when after the month of June we lose him as a companion, we may well feel that the subject not only loses with him what little literary interest it can boast of, but becomes for the most part a mere investigation of fossil rites, from which all life and meaning have departed for ever.
VI. The Calendar of the Republic and its Religious Festivals.
All the calendars still surviving belong, as we saw, to the early Empire, and represent the Fasti as revised by Julius. But what we have to do with is the calendar of the Republic. Can it be recovered from those we still possess? Fortunately this is quite an easy task, as Mommsen himself has pointed out[39]; we can reconstruct for certain the so-called calendar of Numa as it existed throughout the Republican era. The following considerations must be borne in mind:
1. It is certain that Caesar and his advisers would alter the familiar calendar as little as possible, acting in the spirit of persistent conservatism from which no true Roman was ever free. They added 10 days to the old normal year of 355 days, i. e. two at the end of January, August, and December, and one at the end of April, June, September, and November; but they retained the names of the months, and their division by Kalends, Nones, and Ides, and also the signs of the days, and the names of all festivals throughout the year. Later on further additions were made, chiefly in the way of glorification of the Emperors and their families; but the skeleton remained as it had been under the Republic.
2. It is almost certain that the Republican calendar itself had never been changed from its first publication down to the time of Caesar. There is no historical record of any alteration, either by the introduction of new festivals or in any other way. The origin of no festival is recorded in the history of the Republic, except the second Carmentalia, the Saturnalia, and the Cerealia[40]; and in these three cases we can be morally certain that the record, if such it can be called, is erroneous.
3. If Julius and his successors altered only by slight additions, and if the calendar which they had to work on was of great antiquity and unchanged during the Republic, how, in the next place, are we to distinguish the skeleton of that ancient calendar from the Julian and post-Julian additions? Nothing is easier; in Mommsen’s words, it is not a matter of calculation; a glance at the Fasti is sufficient. In all these it will be seen that the numbers, names, and signs of the days were cut or painted in _large_ capital letters; while ludi, sacrifices, and all additional notes and comments appear in _small_ capital letters. It cannot be _demonstrated_ that the large capital letters represent the Republican calendar; but the circumstantial evidence, so to speak, is convincing. For inscribed in these large capitals is all the information which the Roman of the Republic would need; the _dies fasti_, _comitiales_, _nefasti_, &c.; the number of the days in the month; the position of the Nones and the Ides and the names of those days on which fixed festivals took place; all this in an abbreviated but no doubt familiar form. The minor sacrificial rites, which concerned the priests and magistrates rather than the people, he did not find there; they would only have confused him. The moveable festivals, too, he did not find there, as they changed their date from year to year and were fixed by the priesthood as the time for each came round. The _ludi_, or public games, were also absent from the old calendar, for they were, originally at least, only adjuncts to certain festivals out of which they had grown in course of time. Lastly, all rites which did not technically concern the State as a whole, but only its parts and divisions[41], i. e. of gentes and curiae, of pagi (_paganalia_), montes (_Septimontium_) and sacella (_Sacra Argeorum_), could not be included in the public calendar of the Roman people.
But the Roman of the Republic, even if his calendar were confined to the indications given by the large capital letters in the Julian calendar, could find in these the essential outline of the yearly round of his religious life. This outline we too can reconstruct, though the detail is often wholly beyond our reach. For this detail we have to fall back upon other sources of information, which are often most unsatisfactory and difficult to interpret. What are these other sources, of what value are they, and how can that value be tested?
Apart from the surviving Fasti, we have to depend, both for the completion of the religious calendar, and for the study and interpretation of all its details, chiefly on the fragmentary remains of the works of the two great scholars of the age of Julius and Augustus, viz. Varro and Verrius Flaccus, and on the later grammarians, commentators, and other writers who drew upon their voluminous writings. Varro’s book _de Lingua Latina_, though not complete, is in great part preserved, and contains much information taken from the books of the pontifices, which, did we but possess them, would doubtless constitute our one other most valuable record besides the _Fasti_ themselves[42]. Such, too, is the value of the dictionary of Verrius Flaccus, which, though itself lost, survives in the form of two series of condensed excerpts, made by Festus probably in the second century, A.D., and by Paulus Diaconus as late as the beginning of the ninth[43]. Much of the work of Varro and Verrius is also imbedded in the grammatical writings of Servius the commentator on Virgil, in Macrobius, Nonius, Gellius, and many others, and also in Pliny’s _Natural History_, and in some of the Christian Fathers, especially St. Augustine and Tertullian; but all these need to be used with care and caution, except where they quote directly from one or other of their two great predecessors. The same may be said of Laurentius Lydus[44], who wrote in Greek a work _de Mensibus_ in the sixth century, which still survives. To these materials must be added the great historical writers of the Augustine age; Livy, who, uncritical as he was, and incapable of distinguishing the genuine Italian elements in religious tradition from the accretions of Greek and Graeco-Etruscan myth, yet supplies us with much material for criticism; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who as a foreigner resident for some time in Rome, occasionally describes ritual of which he was himself a witness. The Roman lives of Plutarch, and his curious collection entitled _Roman Questions_, also contain much interesting matter, taken from several sources, e.g. Juba, the learned king of Mauritania, but as a rule ultimately referable to Varro. Beyond these there is no one author of real importance; but the ‘plant’ of the investigator will include of course the whole of Roman literature, and Greek literature so far as it touches Roman life and history. Of epigraphical evidence there is not much for the period of the Republic, beyond the fragments of the Fasti; by far the most valuable Italian religious inscription is not Roman but Umbrian; and the _Acta Fratrum Arvalium_ only begin with the Empire. Yet from these[45], and from a few works of art, however hard of interpretation, some light has occasionally been thrown upon the difficulties of our subject; and the study of early Italian culture is fast progressing under the admirable system of excavation now being supervised by the Italian government.
All this material has been collected, sifted, and built upon by modern scholars, and chiefly by Germans. The work of collecting was done to a great extent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rest of the process mainly in the nineteenth. The chief writers will be quoted as occasion demands; here can only be mentioned, _honoris causa_, the writings of Ambrosch, Preller, Schwegler, Marquardt[46], and of some of the writers in the _Mythological Lexicon_, edited by Roscher, especially Professor Wissowa of Berlin, whose short but pithy articles, as well as his treatises _de Feriis_ and _de Dis Indigetibus_ are models of scholarly investigation[47]. Of late, too, anthropologists and folk-lorists have had something to say about Roman religious antiquities; of these, the most conspicuous is the late lamented Dr. Mannhardt, who applied a new method to certain problems both of the Greek and the Roman religion, and evolved a new theory for their interpretation. Among other works of this kind, which incidentally throw light on our difficulties, the most useful to me have been those of Professor Tylor, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Andrew Lang, and the late Professor Robertson Smith. In the _Religion of the Semites_, by the last named scholar, I seem to see a deeper insight into the modes of religious thought of ancient peoples than in any other work with which I am acquainted.
Yet in spite of all this accumulation of learning and acumen, it must be confessed that the study of the oldest Roman religion is still one of insuperable difficulty, and apt to try the patience of the student all the more as he slowly becomes aware of the conditions of the problem before him. There are festivals in the calendar about which we really know nothing at all, and must frankly confess our ignorance; there are others about which we know just enough to be doubtful; others again, in interpreting which the Romans themselves plainly went astray, leaving us perhaps nothing but a baseless legend to aid us in guessing their original nature. It must be borne in mind that the Roman religion was in ruins when the Julian calendar was drawn up, and that the archaeological research which was brought to bear upon it by Varro and Verrius was not of a strictly scientific character. And during the last two centuries of the Republic, as the once stately building crumbled away, it became overlaid with growths of foreign and especially of Greek origin, under which it now lies hopelessly buried. The ground-plan alone remains, in the form of the calendar as it has been explained above; to this we must hold fast if we would obtain any true conception of the religion of the earliest Roman State[48]. Here and there some portion of the building of which it was the basis can however still be conjecturally restored by the aid of Varro and Verrius and a few other ancient writers, tested by the criticism of modern scholars, and sometimes by the results of the science of comparative religion. Such particular restoration is what has been attempted in this work, not without much misgiving and constant doubt.
The fall of the Republic is in any case a convenient point from which to survey the religious ideas and practice of the conquerors of the civilized world. It is not indeed a more significant epoch in the history of the Roman religion than the era of the Punic wars, when Rome ceased to be a peninsular, and began to be a cosmopolitan state; but it is a turning-point in the history of the calendar and of religious worship as well as of the constitution. Henceforward, in spite of the strenuous efforts of Augustus to revive the old forms of worship, all religious rites have a tendency to become transformed or overshadowed, first by the cult of the Caesars[49]; secondly, by the steadily increasing influence of foreign and especially of Oriental cults; and lastly, by Christianity itself[50].
Taking our stand, then, in the year 46 B.C., the last year of the pre-Julian calendar, we are able in a small volume, by carefully working through that calendar, to lay a firm foundation of material for the study of the religious life and thought of the Roman people while it was still in some sense really Roman. The plan has indeed its disadvantages; it excludes the introduction of a systematic account of certain departments of the subject, such as the development of the priesthoods, the sacrificial ritual, the auspicia, and the domestic practice of religious rites[51]. But if it is true, as it undoubtedly is, that in dealing with the Roman religion we must begin with the cult[52], and that for the cult the one ‘sincerum documentum’ is to be found in the surviving Fasti, these drawbacks may fairly be deemed to be counterbalanced by distinct advantages. And in order to neutralize any bewilderment that may be caused by the constant variety of the rites we shall meet with, both in regard to their origin, history, and meaning, some attempt will be made, when we have completed the round of the year, to sum up our results, to sketch in outline the history of Roman religious ideas, and to estimate the influence of all this elaborate ceremonial on the life and character of the Roman people.
* * * * *
In order to fit the calendar of each month into a single page of this work it has been necessary to print the names of the festivals, and the indications of Kalends, Nones, &c. in _small_ capital letters instead of the large capitals in which they appear in the originals (see above, p. 15). In the headings to the days as they occur throughout the book the method of the originals will be reproduced exactly, i. e. large capitals represent in every case the most ancient calendar of the Republic, and small capitals the _additamenta ex fastis_.
Footnote 1:
The difficult questions connected with this subject cannot be discussed here. Since Mommsen wrote his _Römische Chronologie_ it has at least been possible to give an intelligible account of it, such as that in the _Dict. of Antiquities_ (second edition), in Marquardt’s _Staatsverwaltung_, iii. 281 foll., and in Bouché-Leclercq, _Pontifes_, p. 230 foll. There is a useful summary in H. Peter’s edition of Ovid’s _Fasti_ (p. 19). Mommsen’s views have been criticized by Huschke, _Das Römische Jahr_, and Hartmann, _Der Röm. Kalender_; the former a very unsafe guide, and the latter, unfortunately, an unfinished and posthumous work. The chief ancient authority is Censorinus, _De die natali_, a work written at the beginning of the third century A.D., on the basis of a treatise of Suetonius.
Footnote 2:
_Chron._ 48 foll.; Marq. 284 and notes.
Footnote 3:
Huschke, _op. cit._ 8 foll.; Hartmann, p. 13.
Footnote 4:
1 Censorinus, _De die natali_, 20. 4.
Footnote 5:
Mommsen (_Chron._ 13) believes it to have been a Pythagorean doctrine which spread in Southern Italy. Hartmann, on the contrary, calls it an old Italian one adopted by Pythagoras. See a valuable note in Schwegler, _Röm. Gesch._ i. 561, inclining to the latter view.
Footnote 6: