Читать книгу The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic - W. Warde Fowler - Страница 21

Table of Contents

QUINQ[VATRUS]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN. VAT. FARN.)

QUINQUATRIA. (RUST. PHIL. SILV.)

A note is appended in Praen., which is thus completed by Mommsen with the help of a Verrian gloss (Fest. 254).

[RECTIUS TAMEN ALII PUTARUNT DICTUM AB EO QUOD HIC DIES EST POST DIEM V IDUS. QUO]D IN LATIO POST [IDUS DIES SIMILI FERE RATIONE DECLI]NARENTUR.

FERIAE MARTI (VAT.)

[SALI] FACIUNT IN COMITIO SALTUS [ADSTANTIBUS PO]NTIFICIBUS ET TRIB[UNIS] CELER[UM]. Praen., in which we find yet another note: ARTIFICUM DIES [QUOD MINERVAE] AEDIS IN AVENTINO EO DIE EST [DEDICATA].

The original significance of this day is indicated by the note Feriae Marti in Vat., and also by that in Praen., which has been amplified with tolerable certainty. The Salii were active this day in the worship of Mars, and the scene of their activity was the Comitium. With this agrees, as Mommsen has pointed out, the statement of Varro^[158] that the Comitium was the scene of some of their performances, though he does not mention which. More light is thrown on the matter by the grammarian Charisius^[159], who, in suggesting an explanation of the name Quinquatrus by which this day was generally known, remarks that it was derived from a verb quinquare, to purify, ‘quod eo die arma ancilia lustrari sint solita.’ His etymology is undoubtedly wrong, but the reason given for it is valuable^[160]. The ancilia were purified on this day (perhaps by the Salii dancing around them), and thus it exactly answers to the Armilustrium on Oct. 19, just as the horse-races on the Ides of March, if that indeed were the original day, correspond to the ceremony of the ‘October horse’^[161].

The object and meaning of the lustratio in each case is not, however, quite clear. Since in March the season of war began, and ended, no doubt, originally in October^[162], and as the Salii seem to be a kind of link between the religious and military sides of the state’s life, we are tempted to guess that the lustration of the ancilia represented in some way the lustration of the arms of the entire host, or perhaps that the latter were all lustrated so as to be ready for use, on this day, and once again on Oct. 19 before they were put away for the winter. In this latter case the Salii would be the leaders of, as well as sharers in, a general purifying process. And that this is the right view seems to be indicated by Verrius’ note in the Praenestine calendar, from which it is clear that the tribuni celerum were present, and took some part in the ceremony. These tribuni were almost certainly the three leaders of the original cavalry force of the three ancient tribes, and they seem to have united both priestly and military characteristics^[163]; and from their presence in the Comitium may perhaps also be inferred that of the leaders of the infantry tribuni militum. In the earliest times, therefore, the arms of the whole host may have been lustrated in the presence of its leaders, the Salii, so to speak, performing the service; but in later times the Salii alone were left, and their arms alone lustrated, though possibly individuals representing the ancient tribuni celerum may have appeared as congregation.

But this day was generally known as Quinquatrus, simply because it was the fifth day after the Ides^[164]; i.e. there was a space of three days between the Ides and the festival. Such intervals of three days, either between the Ides and the festival or between one festival and another, occur several times in the Roman calendar^[165], though in this instance alone the day following the interval appears in the calendars as Quinquatrus. The term was no doubt a pontifical one, and the meaning was unknown to the common people; in any case it came to be misunderstood, and was in later times popularly applied to the four days following the festival as well as the festival itself; its first syllable being taken to indicate a five-day period instead of the fifth day after the Ides. This popular mistake led to still further confusion owing to a curious change in the religious character of these days, about the nature of which there can be no serious doubt.

The 19th came to be considered as sacred to Minerva^[166], because a temple to that goddess was consecrated on this day, on the Caelian or the Aventine, or possibly both^[167]. There is no obvious connexion between Mars and Minerva; and it is now thought probable that Minerva has here simply taken the place of another goddess, Nerio—one almost lost to sight in historical times, but of whose early connexion with Mars some faint traces are to be found. Thus where we find Minerva brought into close relation with Mars, as in the myth of Anna Perenna, it is thought that we should read Nerio instead of Minerva^[168]. This conclusion is strengthened by a note of Porphyrion on Horace Epist. ii. 2. 209 ‘Maio mense religio est nubere, et etiam Martio, in quo de nuptiis habito certamine a Minerva Mars victus est: obtenta virginitate Neriene est appellata.’ As Neriene must = Nerio^[169], this looks much like an attempt to explain the occurrence of two female names, Minerva and Nerio, in the same story; the original heroine, Nerio, having been supplanted by the later Minerva^[170].

Of this Nerio much, perhaps too much, has been made in recent years by ingenious scholars. A complete love-story has been discovered, in which Mars, at first defeated in his wooing, as Porphyrion tells us in the passage just quoted, eventually becomes victorious; for Nerio is called wife of Mars in a fragment of an old comedy by Licinius Imbrex, in a passage of Plautus, and in a prayer put into the mouth of Hersilia by Gellius the annalist, when she asked for peace at the hand of T. Tatius^[171]. And this story has been fitted on, without sufficient warrant, to the Mars-festivals of this month. Mars is supposed to have been born on the Kalends, to have grown wondrously between Kalends and Ides, to have fallen then in love with Nerio, to have been fooled as we saw by Anna Perenna, to have been rejected and defeated by his sweetheart, and finally to have won her as his wife on the 19th^[172]. Are we to find here a fragment of real Italian mythology, or an elaborate example of the Graecizing anthropomorphic tendencies of the third and second centuries B.C.?

The question is a difficult one, and lies rather outside the scope of this work. Those who have read Usener’s brilliant paper will find it hard to shake themselves free of the conviction that he has unearthed a real myth, unless they carefully study the chapter of Aulus Gellius which is its chief foundation. Such a study has brought me back to the conviction that Plautus and the others were writing in terms of the fashionable modes of thought of their day, and were not appealing to popular ideas of the relations of Italian deities to each other^[173]. Aulus Gellius begins by quoting a comprecatio from the book of the Libri sacerdotum populi Romani. ‘In his scriptum est: Luam Saturni, Salaciam Neptuni, Horam Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maiam Volcani, Heriem Iunonis, Moles Martis Nerienemque Martis.’ A glance at the names thus coupled together is enough to show that Mars is not here thought of as the husband of Neriene; the names Lua, Salacia, &c., seem rather to express some characteristic of the deity with whose name they are joined or some mode of his operation^[174]; and Gellius himself, working on an etymology of Nerio which has generally been accepted as correct, explains the name thus: ‘Nerio igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis demonstratur.’ In the latter part of his chapter, after quoting Plautus, he says that he has heard the poet blamed by an eminent critic for the strange and false notion that Nerio was the wife of Mars; but he is inclined to think that there was a real tradition to that effect, and cites his namesake the annalist and Licinius Imbrex in support of his view.

But neither annalist nor play-writer can stand against that passage from the sacred books with which he began his chapter; and if we give the latter its due weight, the value of the others is relatively diminished. It appears to me that the one represents the true primitive Italian idea of divine powers, which with its abundance of names offered excellent opportunities to anthropomorphic tendencies of the Graecizing school, while the others show those tendencies actually producing their results. Any conclusion on the point must be of the nature of a guess; but I am strongly disposed to think (1) that Nerio was not originally an independent deity, but a name attached to Mars expressive of some aspect of his power, (2) that the name gradually became endowed with personality, and (3) that out of the combination of Mars and Nerio the Graecizing school developed a myth of which the fragments have been taken by Usener and his followers as pure Roman.

Having once been displaced by Minerva, Nerio vanished from the calendar, and with her that special aspect of Mars—whatever it may have been—which the name was intended to express. The five days, 18th to 23rd, became permanently associated with Minerva. The 19th was the dedication-day of at least one of her temples, and counted as her birthday^[175]: the 23rd was the Tubilustrium, with a sacrifice to ‘dea fortis,’ who seems to have been taken for Minerva, owing to an incorrect idea that the latter was specially the deity of trumpet-players^[176]. She was no doubt an old Italian deity of artificers and trade-guilds; but the Tubilustrium was really a Mars-festival, and Minerva had no immediate connexion with it.