Читать книгу The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic - W. Warde Fowler - Страница 10

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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.