Читать книгу Plutarch's Romane Questions - Plutarch - Страница 4
INTRODUCTION.
ОглавлениеI. The Subject of the "Romane Questions" and of this Introduction.
The "fashions and customes of Rome," which prompted Plutarch's questions, are directly or indirectly associated with the worship of the gods, while the solutions which he suggests contain occasionally myths. It is not, however, all Roman gods, cults, and myths that are discussed by Plutarch: he limits himself, on the whole, to those which are purely Roman, or rather purely Italian. This limitation is not accidental, and it is significant. It does not indeed appear that Plutarch designed to confine himself thus: the fact seems rather to be that, long before his time, the Romans had borrowed the myths, the ritual, and the gods of Greece, and that Plutarch, as a Greek, found nothing strange or unintelligible in the resemblances which the Roman ritual of his day bore to the religion of his native land. It was the points of difference which caught his attention.
And here we must note a further limitation of the subject of the Romane Questions and of this Introduction. Surprise and inquiry are excited not by the familiar, but by the unusual; so Plutarch's attention was arrested not by customs which, though purely Italian, were universal in Italy, e.g., the practice of covering the head during worship, but by fashions for which he could find no analogy or parallel in the stage of religion with which alone he was acquainted. In such isolated customs, out of harmony with their surroundings, modern science sees "survivals" from an earlier stage of culture; and it is as survivals that they will be treated in this Introduction. Now, the stage of religion with which Plutarch was familiar, and in which he could find no analogies for those "fashions and customes," was polytheism; and if those practices are survivals, they must be survivals from a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.
Here, however, a difficulty meets us. If the teaching of the Solar Mythologists be true, the Aryans, having a mythology, were already polytheists: much more, therefore, must the Italians have been polytheists from the beginning. I am sorry to say that I cannot meet this difficulty: I can only frankly warn the reader that it exists. But in an Introduction which professes to confine itself to myths and cults which are purely Italian, it is impossible to discuss Solar Mythology, for the simple reason that there is no such thing in existence as an Italian solar myth, or indeed Nature-myth of any kind. The only story which is seriously claimed as a Nature-myth is that of Hercules and Cacus. Cacus, a monster or giant, stole some cows from Hercules, and hid them in his cave. Hercules discovered them, according to some accounts, by the aid of Caca, the sister of Cacus, according to other accounts, by the lowing which the cows in the cave set up when Hercules went by with the rest of his oxen. Hercules forced his way into the cave, and, in spite of the fire and flames which Cacus spat at him, killed the monster with his club. Then Hercules, in commemoration of the discovery of his cattle, erected an altar to Jupiter the Discoverer (Jupiter Inventor). Now a similar story, it would appear, is to be found in the Vedas. Vritra, a three-headed snake, steals cows from Indra, who discovers them in a cave by their lowing, and kills Vritra with a club. And the Vaidic story must be a Nature-myth, because the Vedas expressly explain that the cows are clouds, the lowing is thunder, the club is the lightning, and Indra, on this occasion, the blue sky. But why is the interpretation given by the Vaidic philosophers to be accepted without examination, when we reject the teaching of the Stoics, who interpreted Rhea as matter, and Zeus, Posidon, and Hades as fire, water, and air respectively, in accordance with the Stoic philosophy of the universe? I submit it as a possibility, worth consideration at least, that we have here an ordinary folk-tale: the trick of using the bulls to make the cows reveal their hiding-place is like the trick in the folk-tale about the groom of Darius who caused his master's horse to neigh and so secured the Persian empire to Darius. The story may have been told of some clever fellow (not necessarily or probably of a god) in pro-ethnic Aryan times, or it may have been hit on by Hindoo and Italian story-tellers independently. Once invented, however, it was used by each of these two peoples in a characteristic manner. The learned Roman, whose object was to explain the origin of the customs, cults, institutions, &c., of Rome, seized on it as the obvious explanation of two facts which required explanation, viz., first, how the altar to Jupiter Inventor came into existence; and second, why the offering made in gratitude for the recovery of lost property, was an ox. The learned Hindoo, on the other hand, had the satisfaction of showing that even the stories with which (alone or chiefly) the common people were acquainted bore unsuspected witness to the truth of the religion he taught. But to return to our interpretation of the "fashions and customes" of Rome as survivals of a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.
A second difficulty remains. Distinguished writers on the philosophy of religion hold that polytheism is not developed out of fetichism or animism, but is primitive and underived from any earlier stage. The survivals, then, which Plutarch records, could not point to the existence of an earlier stage. Here, again, it is not for me to handle such high themes as the philosophy of religion. I am bound down to the humbler task of noting the simple fact that, until borrowed from Hellas, polytheism was unknown in Italy.
This is a very bare statement—so naked as almost to amount to a literary impropriety. I must, therefore, take three sections to clothe it.
II. Italian Gods.
That some of the great gods of Rome were but Greek gods borrowed is universally admitted (see e.g. Mommsen's History of Rome, i. 186 ff., or Ihne, i. 119). Even so strong a supporter of the theory of a Græco-Italian period as Roscher admits unreservedly that the mythology, worship, and the very name of Apollo were borrowed in early but still historic times (Lexikon, i. 446). When, then, we find Plutarch putting the question why the temples of Æsculapius and Vulcan were built outside Rome (Romane Questions, 94 and 47), we at once surmise that these were imported gods, whose worship was indeed sanctioned and ordained by the Roman State but was not admitted within the sacred circle of the pomœrium, reserved for the temples of indigenous Roman gods. In the case of Æsculapius we have historical proof that his was an imported worship; in consequence of a pestilence in Rome in B.C. 293 the god was fetched from Epidaurus, and the temple in question was erected two years afterwards.[1] We do not happen to have any similar historical record of the introduction of Vulcan's worship, but the name of the god, be it Cretan or Etruscan, is foreign.[2]
Having eliminated these and other loan-gods, we find that the genuine Italian deities which remain fall into two classes. The one class consists of such abstractions as Forculus, the spirit of doors; Cardea, that of hinges; Limentinus, that of the threshold, &c., which can scarcely be dignified by the name of gods, but are rather spirits, and amply warrant Chantepie de la Saussaye's remark that Roman religion was still steeped in animism.[3] The other class includes such gods as Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Diana, Venus, Hercules, &c. It is necessary to note, however, that the worship even of these gods can be proved to have been considerably Hellenised in historic times:[4] some of their ritual and all their mythology was borrowed from Greece, as we shall subsequently see. And when the loan-myths and loan-cults have been removed, the genuine Italian gods stand forth essentially and fundamentally different from those of Greece.[5] Here, too, we may note that if comparative mythologists adhere to their principle of not identifying the gods of different nations, unless their names can be shown by comparative philology to be identical, they must admit that Mars and Ares, Venus and Aphrodite, Diana and Artemis, Juno and Hera, and all the other pairs of deities which the ancients identified, are, with the sole exception of Jupiter and Zeus and of Vesta and Hestia, not of cognate but of diverse origin. In fine, the differences between Greek and Italian gods are fundamental and original: the resemblances can be shown to be due to borrowing in historic times.
There is, however, one of the great Roman gods who was never identified with any Hellenic deity, Janus. Now, although Janus ranks with Jupiter and Mars in the Roman system as an indubitable god, yet in origin and function he is not to be distinguished from those inferior, animistic powers to whom the title of spirit is the highest that can be assigned. Janus is the spirit that resides in or presides over door-openings (ianus, ianua), just as Forculus has to do with doors (fores), Limentinus with the threshold (limen), and Cardea with the hinges (cardo). He is also the "spirit of opening,"[6] who was to be invoked at the commencement of every act. Plutarch's questions why he should be represented with two heads, and why the year should begin with the month named after him, January (R. Q., 22 and 19), are thus at once explained: "The double-head looking both ways was connected with the gate that opened both ways;" and in January, "after the rest of the middle of winter, the cycle of the labours of the field began afresh."[7]
That the door or the threshold is the seat of a tutelary spirit or genius is a belief familiar enough in folk-lore: the door must not be banged,[8] nor wood chopped on the threshold,[9] for fear of disturbing him. He is apt to disappear, taking the luck of the house with him, if a cat is maliciously buried under the door-sill,[10] or if human hair is so buried.[11] The importance of the door as a possible entrance for evil spirits, or exit for lucky ones, is manifest in many customs, e.g., nailing a horse-shoe on the door or sticking a knife into the door, and in such beliefs as that when a door opens (apparently) of itself, a spirit is entering.
Whether the Italian spirit of the doorway, who in origin is indistinguishable from the similar though nameless spirits to be found elsewhere, was capable by his own unaided efforts of raising himself to the rank of a god, is matter for speculation. What is clear is that he had not the chance: the introduction of Greek polytheism into Italy promoted him without exertion on his part.
As, thus far, I have assumed a distinction between "gods" and "spirits," and have also assumed that a belief in the latter may exist without polytheism and precede it, it will be well here to state explicitly the distinction. And that I may not be suspected of drawing the distinction so as to suit my own ends, I shall here borrow from a standard work, Chantepie de la Saussaye's Religionsgeschichte (i. 90). De la Saussaye notes five characteristics involved in the conception of "gods." First, they are related to one another as members of a family or community, and as subject to one god, who is either lord of all, or at any rate primus inter pares. Second, with the growth of art, they are represented plastically and are made in the image of man. Third, as ethics advance, moral benefits are associated with their worship. Hence, in the fourth place, the gods are conceived as personal, individual beings, ideally good and beautiful. Finally, the human intellect demands that the relations of the gods to one another and to Nature should be co-ordinated into a system, and so theogonies and cosmogonies are invented.
Now, if these be the marks whereby gods are distinguished from spirits, I submit that, before the introduction of Greek gods and cults, the Romans had not advanced as far as polytheism, but were still in the purely animistic stage. Here again, to avoid the temptation of interpreting the evidence unduly in favour of the conclusion to which it seems to me to point, I will confine myself to quotations. Ihne (Hist. of Rome, i. 118) says that to the Romans, before the period of Hellenic influence, "the gods were only mysterious spiritual beings, without human forms, without human feelings and impulses, without human virtues or weaknesses. … Though the divine beings were conceived as male or female, they did not join in marriage or beget children. … No genuine Roman legend tells of any race of nobles sprung from gods." Again, "The original Roman worship had no images of the gods or houses set apart for them" (Mommsen, i. 183). "A simple spear, even a rough stone, sufficed as a symbol" (Ihne, 119). Roman religion had nothing to do with morality: "it was designed for use in practical life" (Ibid. 120). "The religion of Rome had nothing of its own peculiar growth even remotely parallel to the religion of Apollo investing earthly morality with its halo of glory" (Mommsen, 172). Mommsen's observation that "the hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly foreign to the Romans" (174) is explained by the fact that a hero is a being of human origin raised by good deeds to the rank of a god, and the Romans had no gods. Myths about the love-adventures of the gods and theogonies were unknown to early Rome.[12] An Italian cosmogony has not yet been discovered, and even the wide-spread belief in the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth had not been evolved in Italy.
In fine "the beings which the Romans worshipped were rather numina than personal gods."[13] Even the spirits whom we can trace back under definite names to the purely Italian period, such as Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, Mars, are not individual, personal beings. Each of these names is the name of a class of spirits. "Each community of course had its own Mars, and deemed him to be the strongest and holiest of all" (Mommsen, i. 175). Each household had its own Vesta. There were many Jupiters, many Junos. In England, in the same way, the name of Puck, who is a definite individual personality in one stage of our fairy mythology, was originally a class-name of the spirits whom, as Burton says in his Anatomy, "we commonly call poukes."
I will conclude this section with quotations from two distinguished authorities on Mythology, who would both dissent from the views which have been advanced above, but whose words seem to me to bear unintentional testimony in favour of those views. E. H. Meyer, in his Indogermanische Mythen (ii. 612), says, "Roman religion seldom displays more than the elementary rudiments, or rather let us say the last remnants of mythology," and "whereas the cult of the greater gods is known to us in a form greatly affected by Hellenism, … the local gods usually scarcely rise above the rank of spirits (sich meistens kaum über daemonischen Rang erheben)." Preller, in his Römische Mythologie (i. 48), says, "The Romans' belief in gods would be termed more rightly pandæmonism than polytheism. … One is involuntarily reminded of those Pelasgians of Dodona who, according to Herodotus, assigned neither names nor epithets to their gods. … Indeed, most of the names of the oldest Roman gods have such a shifting, indefinite meaning, that they can scarcely be regarded as proper names, as the names of persons."
III. Italian Cults.
The Italians borrowed cults as well as gods from Greece, but "these external additions gathered round the kernel of the Roman religion without affecting or transforming its inmost core" (Ihne, i. 119). The distinguishing characteristic of the religion of Rome is that "it was designed for use in practical life" (Ibid. 120), "The god of the Italian was above all things an instrument for helping him to the attainment of very solid earthly objects" (Mommsen, i. 181). In fact, the Italian god was a fetich, i.e., a magical implement; and in this sense of the word it is true that "the Romans saw everywhere and in all things the agency and the direction of the gods" (Ihne, i. 118). Every act of life was entangled in a complicated network of ritual.[14] Every part of the house, the door, doorway, threshold, hinges, every process of farming, sowing, manuring, &c., every act of life from birth to burial, had its own particular spirit; and the object of the Roman with reference to each particular spirit was "to manage, and even in case of need to over-reach or to constrain him" (Mommsen, i. 177). Preller in his Römische Mythologie characterises the religion of Rome as, above all things, "a cultus-religion." We may add that in Rome, as in China, Assyria, and Babylonia, the cult was nothing but organised magic,[15] the superstitious customs, charms, and incantations familiar to the folk-lorist in all countries were organised by the practical Roman and were state-established by him. In fine, the Romans "in their gods worshipped the abstract natural forces, to whose power man is conscious that he is subject every instant, but which he can win over and render subservient to his purposes by scrupulously obeying the external injunctions which the State issues for the worship of the gods."[16]
A fundamental difference between the Greek and Roman religions manifests itself in the matter of magic. Magic was foreign to the Greeks, and was disliked by them: when it appears in their mythology, it is practised by foreigners—e.g., Medea, Circe, Hecate—and is "barbarous." In fact, magic belongs to the animistic stage, and is opposed to the higher tendencies of polytheism. The forces of Nature, conceived as numina rather than as moral ideals, may well be influenced by magic to the advantage of the savage; but to control a deity by means other than prayer and good life is antitheistic.
Finally, it is not accidental or unmeaning that, on the one hand, the Greeks had oracles while the Italians had none; and on the other hand, that in China and Babylon (which resemble Rome in other pertinent points) divination played as large and as official a part as at Rome. An oracle is the voice of a god; whereas divination is simply sympathetic magic inverted.[17]
IV. Italian Myths.
In sect. 1 it has been said that the Italians had no Nature-myths. The reason why they had none should now be clear: the Italians had no Nature-gods. The sky-spirit, Jupiter, was undoubtedly distinguished from the vault of heaven by the primitive Italians, but he was not generically different from the spirits of vegetation, of sowing, of manuring, &c., and he seems to have been even of inferior dignity to the spirit of doorways.[18] The earth, on the other hand, does not seem to have been conceived of as a spirit even, much less as a goddess; but, if worshipped at all, was worshipped as a fetich.[19] Hence, the absence from Italy of any trace of the myth of the origin of all living creatures from a union between the earth and the sky.
Indeed, if by a myth we mean a tale told about gods or heroes, there are no Italian myths.[20] Myths attached to Greek loan-gods were borrowed with the gods from Greece. Myths in which Italian gods figure were borrowed or invented when the Italian gods were identified with Greek gods. Thus the Golden Age myth, for instance, can be referred to the time (A.U.C. 257) when Saturnus was identified with Kronos.[21] And of course, all the myths in which Æneas appears, and the whole mythical connection between Rome and Greece or Troy, are late.[22] Evander,[23] again, who figures in various passages of the Romane Questions, owes his existence wholly and solely to the attempt to connect Rome with Greece.
If, on the other hand, under the head of myth we include "the popular explanation of observed facts," then early Roman history, as Ihne says (i. 17), "is really nothing more than a string of tales, in which an attempt is made to explain old names, religious ceremonies and monuments, political institutions and antiquities, and to account for their origin." Some examples of this may be drawn from the Romane Questions. Marriage by capture has left traces behind it in the wedding customs of many countries, and the meaning of these survivals is usually wholly forgotten. But the historic consciousness of the Romans was so far alive to the actual facts of the case that the mock capture was explained as the commemoration of an actual historical rape—the Rape of the Sabines. Thus were explained the lifting of the bride over the threshold (Q. R. 19), the use of a javelin point to divide the bride's hair (Ibid. 87), the hymeneal cry Talassio (Ibid. 31), and the fact that maids might not (though widows might) marry on festival days (Ibid. 105). The first of these customs is probably a survival from marriage by capture, and the last is indirectly connected with it. In Rome,[24] as in many other places,[25] the lamentations of the bride who was actually captured survived in the formal, extravagant lamentations of the bride who, in quieter times, was more peacefully won; and these cries would have been of bad omen on a day dedicated to the worship of the gods. Lamentation seems not to have been required of widows. The use of an iron javelin point is probably due to the dangers which, in the opinion of primitive man, attend on those about to marry, and require to be averted by the use of iron,[26] from the head[27] especially. The origin of the cry Talassio is beyond recovery.[28]
But though the chief branch of Italian folk-tales consisted of popular explanations of observed facts, we can detect traces of those other folk-tales which from the beginning must have been designed simply and solely to gratify man's inherent desire for tales of adventure and the marvellous. Here it must suffice to point to two of the Romane Questions. In the fourth question we have a tale told of successful trickery on the part of Servius Tullius, which may well have formed part of some story of a Master Thief; and in Romane Questions 36, the nightly visits of Fortuna through the window to her lover, Servius Tullius, at once remind us of the "soul-maidens" and "swan-maidens," who visit, and eventually desert, their human lover through the window or the keyhole[29]—the orthodox means of entrance and exit for spirits from the time of Homer at least.
IV. The Soul.
The customs and beliefs, the superstitious practices and supernatural beings, of modern European folk-lore are sometimes explained as the wrecks and remnants of the Pagan polytheism which preceded Christianity. And if the Aryan peoples were from the very beginning polytheists; if the Hellenes and the Hindoos, the Teutons and the Scandinavians, brought their myths and their cults with them from the original Aryan home, then this explanation seems more reasonable than that which proceeds on a mere conjecture, a pure assumption that the Aryan religion was animistic ere it was polytheistic; for then we are obliged to relegate Aryan animism almost to the æon "of chaos and eternal night,"—at any rate, to an abysm of time which is such that neither linguistic palæontology nor any other science has dared
"to venture down
The dark descent and up to reascend."
But if the proposition submitted in the previous sections be sound, if in early but still historic times Italian religion was still in a stage anterior to polytheism, then Aryan animism is no longer a mere assumption, and need no longer be thrust back into pro-ethnic times. Early Italian customs and beliefs will not be the débris of a previous polytheism, and it will therefore be unreasonable to explain their counterparts in modern folk-lore as mutilated myths or as the cult of gods degraded but worshipped still.
Plutarch, in the fifth of his Romane Questions (p. 8 below), propounds an interesting problem: Why are they who have beene falsly reported dead in a strange countrey, although they returne home alive, not received nor suffred to enter directly at the dores, but forced to climbe up to the tiles of the house, and so to get down from the roufe into the house? This remarkable custom continued to be practised long after its origin and object had been forgotten; for Plutarch relates a tale which is obviously a popular explanation, invented to account for a practice the rationale of which had become unintelligible.[30] Hard, however, as Plutarch's question appears at first sight, it may by the aid of modern folk-lore and savage custom be explained. We have to note, in the first place, that the mode of entry prescribed for the returned traveller is not spontaneously adopted by him; and presumably, therefore, is not prescribed in his interest: it is enforced by his relatives, and probably for their own protection. In the next place, though the traveller himself knows, of course, that he has not returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns, his relatives have no such assurance: it may be, indeed, that he did not die whilst away, as they were informed or led to believe; but, on the other hand, he may be "the ghost of their dear friend dead," seeking to obtain an entrance into his old home. The reasonable course for them to pursue, therefore, is to treat him as though he were a ghost: if he is no ghost, it will do him no harm; if he is, they will have protected themselves.
Thus far our explanation is hypothetical: to verify the hypothesis it is necessary to show that the dead are or were as a matter of fact treated as the Roman custom prescribes that the soi disant living man shall be treated. That the spirits of the dead are considered unwelcome visitors both in modern folk-lore and by savage man, has been insisted on most recently by Mr. G. L. Gomme.[31] I will, therefore, only add one or two instances of the precautions taken to prevent the return of the deceased to his home.[32] The first thing is to get the soul out of the house; this may be effected by sweeping out the house and by flapping dusters about, care being taken to shake and turn upside down all vessels, meal-boxes, &c., in which the soul might take refuge. Then the coffin must be carried foot foremost through the door; for if the corpse's face be turned to the house, the ghost can return. In Siam they run the corpse three times round the house, apparently on the same principle as, in the game of blind-man's buff, the blind-man is spun round in order to make him lose his bearings. In Bohemia they turn the coffin about cross-wise, outside the house-door, to prevent the dead man from coming back.
More pertinent for our present purpose are the precautions taken to prevent the dead from obtaining access to the house through the door. The safest course is to carry the corpse out, not through the door, for that gives the dead man the right of way which it is sought to bar, but through some opening which is specially made for the purpose and can be permanently closed. Thus the Hottentots make a breach through the wall for the purpose. The ancient Norsemen did the same.[33] The Teutons, in pre-Christian times, dug a hole under the threshold and pulled the corpse through with a rope. In Christian times they only treated the bodies of criminals and suicides in this way, though in the thirteenth century Brother Berthhold of Regensburg recommended it in the case of heretics and usurers.
When circumstances make it difficult or impossible to construct a special exit of this kind for the corpse, then some other means is found to avoid carrying the corpse through the door. The Eskimo take the body through a window; and a window was in 1858 used in Sonneberg in the case of a hanged man; while even now in East Prussia, if several children have died one after another, the corpse of the next to die is conveyed through the window.
Eventually it comes to be considered sufficient if a special means of egress is provided, not for the corpse, which is not likely to "walk," but for the spirit, which may want to return. Thus in China, at the moment of death, a small hole is made through the roof; while the custom of opening the window, to allow the soul of the dying man to depart, is universal in Germany and not unknown in England.
Finally, all that is considered necessary to bar the right of way to the dead man's spirit is to close the house-door immediately after the departure of the corpse, and keep it closed until the return of the funeral party.
If the explanation which has now been given of Plutarch's fifth question be correct, we must ascribe to the early Italians beliefs and customs similar to or identical with those quoted above from modern folk-lore; and it will not be illegitimate to seek further parallels to Italian religion from the same source. Thus, in Romane Questions, 51, Plutarch inquires why the Lares Præstites are represented as clad in dog-skins and as having a dog by their side.[34] Now, it is universally admitted that the Lar Familiaris of the Romans is the same as the house-spirit of the Teutons, and that both are the spirits of a deceased ancestor, the founder of the family and its spirit guardian. In the absence of any presumption to the contrary, we may conclude that the Lares Præstites were also spirits of deceased ancestors. The dog which accompanies the Lares was explained by the ancients as a symbolic representation of the fidelity and watch-dog functions of the Lares.[35] So, too, the priests of ancient Egypt said that the animal forms in which their gods were represented were merely symbolical.[36] But it may safely be laid down as a law in the evolution of religion that beast-worship is primitive, and that the theory of symbolism is but a via media whereby more elevated conceptions of deity are reconciled with the older and more savage worship. Analogy, then, is all in favour of the supposition that the Lares Præstites were originally conceived not in human shape, but in the form of dogs. What we require to confirm the analogy is evidence that the dead—if possible, evidence that guardian spirits—sometimes appear in the shape of a dog. As a matter of fact, the belief that a dead man's spirit may manifest itself in the likeness of a black dog still survives in Germany.[37] As for the guardian spirit, I would suggest that the Mauthe dog of Peel Castle is a house-spirit; for as the hearth was the peculiar seat of the Lar Familiaris and of the Hûsing or Herdgota, and as the English house-spirit
