The practice which is the subject of this lecture was a comparatively late growth in the religious history of ancient Italy. We commonly and vaguely translate lustratio by ‘purification’, lustrare by ‘purify’; but in Latin literature there is another sense of the word, which shows well how one particular kind of purification had become associated with it—I mean the sense of a slow ordered movement in procession. This stately processional movement, so characteristic of the old Roman character, so characteristic still of the grandeur and discipline of the Roman Church in Italy, impressed itself for ever on the Latin language in the word lustrare. Let me quote a single beautiful example of it. When Aeneas first sees and addresses Dido he says:

‘So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows on the hills.’ Long ago, when fishing in Wales, I watched this procession of the shadows, and ever since then it has been associated in my mind with the many ancient Italian processions which I have had to study. Such is the magical power of a great poet of nature.

But before we go on to examine the nature and meaning of these processions it is necessary to go much further back, in order to get some idea of the primitive Italian ideas of ‘purification’ out of which they were developed. We know them only in the farm and the city of historical times; they belong at the earliest to the comparatively settled and civilized life of the Italian agricultural community, and reached their highest development in the highly organized City-State. But there is much to be said—much more than I have time to say now—about the ideas to which they owe their origin.

There are certain words in Latin bearing the sense of purification, which are older, if I am not mistaken, than lustrare and lustratio, and which belong, I should be inclined to believe, to a ‘pre-animistic’ period: to a period, that is, when the thing to be got rid of by what we call purification was not so much evil influences in the form of spirits as some mysterious miasmatic contamination. These words are februum, februare, februatio, from which the name of our second month, the month of purification, is derived. Februum is a material object with magical purifying power, which the late Romans might call piamen, or purgamen (Ovid, Fast. ii. 19 foll.), using a word belonging to the priestly ritual of the fully developed State. A number of such objects were in use at Rome on particular occasions, all called generically by this name februum—water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, pine-twigs, cakes made of certain ‘holy’ ingredients, and at the Lupercalia, strips of the skin of a victim. These belong to the region of magic, and are intimately connected with charms and amulets, which were and still are so popular and universal in Italy. They belong to the same category, psychologically considered, as the bulla of children, the apex of the flamines, a pointed twig fixed on the head or head-dress, and the galerus, the cap of the Flamen Dialis, made of the skin of a white victim which had been sacrificed to Jupiter. These are all survivals from an older stratum of religious thought than the processional rites which we are going to study: they date from a period when magical processes were the rule and religious processes the exception.

I am not going to let myself be drawn here into the vexed question of the relation of religion to magic—two words which, simply by virtue of their being words with constantly shifting connotation—are very apt to mislead us. But putting aside this controversy, it is helpful, I think, to suggest that februum and februare belong to an age when material contamination, e. g. of a corpse or of blood—in other words, of things ‘taboo’—could be got rid of by magical means, lustrare and lustratio to an age when the thing to be driven and kept away is spiritual mischief—the influence of spirits that may be hostile—and when the means used are sacrifices and prayer, with processional movement. To draw the line clearly, however, between a magical period and a religious period is in Roman history quite impossible, as indeed it is and must be everywhere. Magical and quasi-magical processes are taken up into the processes of a period which may be called religious, and survive in an amphibious condition for which it is difficult to find a name. The Flamen Dialis, for example, was priest of Jupiter, and as such in all his duties was an official of a highly organized religious system, yet he was afflicted with an extraordinary number of taboos—now familiar to all readers of The Golden Bough—which survived from a period long anterior to that of religion in the true sense of the word. The purification of new-born children on the dies lustricus is an essential part of the religion of the family, and the word lustricus is itself, in my view, a mark of a period of religion; but the original meaning of the ceremony is probably to be found in pre-animistic ideas. So too with the purification of the family after a funeral, where the original horror of a corpse common to all primitive peoples is still just discernible in the religious ritual of historical times.[116] And, as we shall presently see, the belief that he who has shed blood, even of an enemy, needs purification, is still to be found lurking in the form of one of those acts of lustratio with which we are about to occupy ourselves.

But on the whole it may be said of the Romans, as Dr. Farnell has said of our Teutonic ancestors (Evolution of Religion, p. 108), that cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on their consciences. Assuredly it may be so said of the Romans of historical times, subjected to the quieting influences of priestly law and ritual, which found infallible remedies for the conscience of the individual, for his fear of evil powers material or spiritual—expedients to emancipate him from the bondage of taboo[117]—in the religious action of the State as a whole. It may perhaps be guessed that even in an age long before the State arose the conscience of the Latin was never ‘intensified’ as regards purification from bloodshed or other mischance or misdeed. The impurity or holiness of blood, as conceived by all primitive peoples, has left no obvious trace in Roman ideas, legends, or literature; it is to be found, but it does not attract our attention as it does in Greece. I believe that the explanation of this lies in the genius of the Roman for law, and in his early and very distinct conception of the State and of the authority of its officials. It may, indeed, be also due to the invasion of Latium by a people of advanced culture, who had but little to say to the grosser material ideas of an aboriginal population; but this is still merely speculation, into which I cannot enter now. Whatever the cause, the religion of the Romans as we know it shows no horror, no fear, so long as the worship of the gods is performed exactly and correctly according to the rules of the State priesthoods: there is no sense of sin or of pollution, of taboo irremediably broken, haunting the mind of the individual: all is cheerfully serious, regular, ordered, ritualistic; and nowhere can we see this better than in the public and private lustral processions of the Roman people.

A word, however, in the first place about the original meaning of the word lustratio. Lustrare is a strong form of luere: and luere is explained by Varro as equivalent to solvere (De Ling. Lat. vi. 11): ‘Lustrum nominatum tempus quinquennale a luendo, id est solvendo; quod quinto quoque anno vectigalia et ultro tributa per censores persolvebantur.’ He is followed by Servius, who explains such expressions as ‘paena commissa luere’, ‘peccata luere’, ‘supplicium luere’,[118] on the same principle. We might, therefore, be tempted to think that the root-meaning of lustrare is to perform a duty or an obligation, and so to rid oneself of it—to go through a religious rite as due to a deity. But this would be to misconceive the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained luere by reference to the payment of taxes. We have not yet arrived at a period in Roman thought when we can speak of a sense of religious duty: it is not a money obligation or a ritualistic one that has to be got ‘rid of’, in the earliest ages of the Latin farm or City-State, but those ubiquitous spirits, presumably hostile until they are reclaimed, which haunt the life of man in the animistic stage. Varro and his successors do, however, give us the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of purging yourself or getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man’s intelligence, but of the relation of man to man in a civilized state.

If, then, lustrare originally embodies this sense of ridding oneself of something, we can now go on to examine the oldest forms of lustratio. I will not here go into the further question whether lues, a pest, and the shadowy deity Lua Mater, who was the consort or companion in some antique sense of Saturnus, are words belonging to the same group and explicable on the same principle.

Now, in order to understand clearly how this necessity of getting rid of hostile spirits came to suggest those solemn processional rites which we associate with the word lustratio, we must fully appreciate the fact that the earliest settlers in Italy who had any knowledge of agriculture found it a country of forest-clad hills; the river valleys were marshy and unhealthy, and the earliest settlements were in clearings made in the woodland. This fact was dimly appreciated by the Romans themselves, and is proved by the archaeological evidence available to-day. The first thing, then, to be done was to make a clearing; and this was a most perilous task, for when you cut down trees and dug up the soil, how were you to tell what unknown spirits you might be disturbing and aggravating? They might be in the trees and the plants, they might be in the animals whose homes were in the trees and the ground, the rocks and the springs. In the later Roman ritual we can still see traces of this old feeling of peril. Cato has preserved for us the formula used by the farmer in historical times when making a new clearing; the prayer accompanying his sacrifice began with ‘Si deus, si dea’—for how was he to know the name or sex of the spirit of the wood he was invading? When digging up the soil he had to offer an expiatory sacrifice; and the ancient gild of the Fratres Arvales had to offer special piacula for the falling of a bough in their grove, or for any injury to a tree in it.[119] And when your clearing was complete, and you had settled down with your own household spirits, e. g. of the hearth-fire and the store-cupboard (Vesta and Penates), or had induced some of the native spirits to be friendly and serviceable to you—those especially of the land and the springs,—there was yet another difficulty of the greatest importance, viz. to keep those wild ones still dwelling in the woodland around you from encroaching on your clearing or annoying you in your dwelling. That they really could be thus annoying is proved by a curious bit of folklore of which Varro knew, and which has luckily been preserved by St. Augustine, a student of Varro’s works, as an example of Pagan absurdity (Civ. Dei, vi. 9). After the birth of a child, three spirits were invoked—Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Deverra—to prevent Silvanus (the later representative of the woodland spirits generally) from coming into the house and making mischief by night. These three spirits, as their names show, represented the life of settled agriculture: the cutting and pruning of trees (Intercidona), the pounding of corn for the daily meal (Pilumnus), and the raking and sweeping up of the grain (Deverra); and Varro says that they were represented by three men, who imitated the action of axe, pestle, and broom. The real significance of this delightful bit of mummery has never, I think, been correctly understood, simply because the vital difference to the earliest settler between the benevolent spirits of the reclaimed clearing and the hostile spirits of the wild woodland has never been quite fully appreciated.

But this device was one to which you need only have recourse on a particular occasion; the permanent difficulty was to mark off your cultivated land from the forest and its dangerous spiritual population, in some way by which the latter might be prevented from making itself unpleasant. You must draw a definite line between good spirits and bad, between white spirits and black. Here it is that we find the origin of a practice which lasted all through Roman history, passed on into the ritual of the Church, and still survives, as at Oxford on Ascension Day, in the beating of parish bounds. The boundary of the cultivated land was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones placed at intervals, like the cippi of the old Roman pomerium, from the woodland lying around it; and this boundary-line was made sacred by the passage round it (lustratio) at some fixed time of the year—in May as a rule, when the crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences—of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. I must dwell for a moment on this procession as it is described by old Cato; but at this point I may just interpolate the remark that the object of its mysterious influence was the arable land only and the crops.[120] The sheep and cattle were otherwise protected, when, after their seclusion within the boundary during the winter, they were driven out in April to pasture beyond it, where they would be in far greater peril from enemies spiritual and other. If you wish to see how this was done, read Ovid’s account of the Parilia in the fourth book of his Fasti, and Dr. Frazer’s illuminating commentary on it (St. George and the Parilia) in the Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques for 1908, p. 1 foll.

Cato in his treatise on agriculture has left us, in the form of instructions to a real or imaginary bailiff, the formula of the lustratio as it was used in the second century b.c. It is obviously applicable in detail rather to the estate of that period than to a farm of primitive Latium: there are, for example, words which suggest that it was not necessary in those days to go in procession round the whole of the boundary; as was the case afterwards with the lustratio of the ager Romanus, the form survived accommodated to the great increase of the land concerned. But the two main features of the whole rite are no doubt identical with those of the earliest form of it—i. e. the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer’s most valuable property, with the sacrificer and his helps, in this case the bailiff and his assistants: and secondly the prayer to Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection of the whole familia of the farm, together with the crops of every kind, and the cattle within the boundary-line. Though it is not explicitly told us, we can hardly doubt that originally the procession followed the boundary-line, and thus served to keep it clear in the memory as well as to preserve everything within it from hostile spirits outside of it. In Cato’s formula it is disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility, that the farmer seeks to ward off—that is the language of the second century b.c.: and it is Mars pater who is invoked, i. e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but we need not doubt that the primitive farmer used language of a different kind, and addressed the spirits of disease and dearth themselves, of whom one survived into historic times—Robigus, the spirit of mildew. In the ritual of the Arval Brethren, who perhaps retained some details more antique than those of Cato’s instructions, it is a nameless deity, the Dea Dia, who is the chief object of petition (Acta Fratr. Arv., p. 48).

At this point it may be well to ask what was the original idea of the virtue conveyed by going round a piece of land with victims to be sacrificed at the end of the circuit. Such circuitous processions, with or without victims, are to be found in all countries: perhaps the instance most familiar to all of us is that round the walls of Jericho, repeated seven times—the mystic number—in order to destroy their defensive power. But Roman folklore itself, preserved in great abundance by Pliny, supplies an example which goes some way, I think, to show the original nature of the process. Pliny tells us that if a woman in a certain condition, with bare feet and streaming hair, walked round a field, it was completely protected against insects.[121] The act of passing round a crop served as a charm to keep off noxious things—live insects in historical times, noxious spirits, if I am right, in the dawn of agriculture. The charm lay in the condition of the woman, as Dr. Frazer has abundantly shown in The Golden Bough (iii, ed. 2, p. 232 foll.), where he has quoted this passage of Pliny and others from the Roman writers on agriculture. Some power of a similar kind there must have been also in the victims about to be slain; they were chosen according to rule, and under favourable auspices (if we may argue back from the ritual of the city to that of the farm): they were therefore holy, and their blood was about to be shed at one point in the line of circuit. We have here, indeed, passed beyond the region of magic, but we are still in that early stage of religion when a magical idea is at the bottom of the ceremony, though fast losing itself in ideas more advanced and rational.

This religious process, the fencing out of hostile spirits by a boundary-line, and the discovery of the proper formulae for preserving it and all within it, may and indeed must have been the work of ages. But once discovered, the principle of it could be applied to any land or other property of man, and also to man himself. Let us now take some examples of such extensions of the simple practice of the farm.

The farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called pagi; and these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. So at least we can hardly doubt, though we have no explicit account of the processional character of the lustratio pagi. When Ovid, under date of the Paganalia (Jan. 24-6), describes the lustratio, he writes:

but does not make it clear that he uses lustrare in the sense of a procession with the suovetaurilia. Nor can we be sure that the beautiful passage in the first Georgic (338 foll.), beginning, ‘In primis venerare deos,’ refers to a lustratio pagi, though Wissowa seems to imply it,[122] and the lines

give a charming picture of a lustratio of this kind, without enabling us to decide whether he has the farm or the pagus in his mind. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and process applied in most striking fashion.

Just as it was necessary to keep hostile spirits out of the homestead and its land, so it was necessary to keep them out of the city and its land. The walls of the Italian city were sacred, and so was a certain space outside them, called the pomerium. This is well illustrated in the rite used in the foundation of a city even in historical times, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch:[123] it was believed to be of Etruscan origin, like so many other Roman rites, but it is now generally considered to be old Italian in a general sense. A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze, and (on an auspicious day) drew a rectangular furrow where the walls of the city were to be: the earth was turned inwards to indicate the line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This meant that though the walls were sacred, the gates were profane; for, as Plutarch says, had the gates been holy, scruple would have been felt about the passage in and out of them of unholy things. The result of this religious process was to keep outside the sacred boundary of the wall all evil and strange spirits (or, as we may now say, seeing that we are entering an era of higher civilization, strange gods); and inside it there dwelt only those who belonged to the place and its inhabitants (indigetes), and whose alliance and protection had become assured. Inside it, too, and only within its limits, could the auspicia of the city be taken.

We might naturally expect that this sacred wall and boundary would have its holiness and efficacy secured by an annual lustratio of the same kind as that of the farm and pagus; and so it was. We know that there was at Rome a lustral rite called Amburbium, which probably took place at the beginning of the month of purification (February); but it is for us unluckily little more than a name. Later on in the same month we find the extraordinary rite of the Lupercalia (15th), in which the pomerium is so far concerned as that the Luperci, or young men who served as priests on the occasion, ran round the ancient boundary of the Palatine settlement, girt with the skins of the victims, striking at all women who came near them with strips cut from these same skins, in order to produce fertility. But was this really a lustratio urbis? In my Roman Festivals I treated it as such (p. 319), on the ground that Varro uses the word lustrare in alluding to it. I am now, however, disposed to think that Varro was here using the word in a general and not a technical sense, and that the object of it was not, as in the rites we have been discussing, to keep evil spirits away from the city as a whole. It seems to be a survival of some very primitive magico-religious ideas, into which I will not enter now. Certain it is that the leading feature of the true lustratio is absent from it; instead of a slow and stately procession of worshippers and victims, we have the wild running of almost naked youths, apparently personating or embodying a deity.

Fortunately we can illustrate the real lustratio of a city from a different source, and in this case most luckily a documentary one, but from an Umbrian city instead of a Latin one. The town of Gubbio, the modern form of Iguvium, still preserves the priestly instructions, drawn up from older sources probably at the beginning of the last century b. c., for the lustratio of its citadel, the arx (ocris Fisia), by a guild of priests called the Fratres Attiedii.[124] Here the ceremony has been developed under priestly influence into a series of ritualistic acts of the highest exactness and complexity; but the main features of the lustratio stand out quite clearly. The procession goes solemnly round the arx, with the victims, which are the same as those of the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, and offers sacrifice and prayer on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. The gates, three in number, are the scene of the actual sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, as we have seen, and they need to be spiritually strengthened by annual religious operations, though not such as would make them permanently sacred like the wall itself. Doubtless the Fratres Attiedii would have been unable to explain this as I am explaining it; the sense of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary had vanished from the Italian mind when these elaborate liturgical formulae were drawn up. The prayers are cast in language that hardly differs from those of a Church of to-day which asks for a blessing on a community. The deities of the city are asked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops—a list in which the name is the only item which carries us clearly back to pre-Christian times. The ideas and the deities have been developed into a religious system of considerable complexity, but the actual proceedings, the procession and the prayers at the gates, still remind us of the rock whence all this ritual was hewn.

I said that human beings might be subjected to the lustral process en masse, as well as land and city. Before we return from Iguvium to Rome, I may mention that the Iguvian documents also contain instructions for the lustratio of the people.[125] So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the people was brought together in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round them a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer (the former not apparently with the usual suovetaurilia), and Mars and two female consorts or representatives of his power were entreated to confound and frighten certain enemies of the city, in language which reminds me of the prayer in time of war, now happily abandoned, which I can remember as a child being read in the days of the Crimean war—‘abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices’. Then followed of course a prayer for blessing on the Iguvini. This may conveniently bring us back to Rome; for in the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (iv. 22), we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host with sacrifice to Mars. This was no doubt really the early form of the census, which had a military meaning and origin.

The explanation of this lustration of the host, the male population in arms, of a community, is not quite the same as that of the rite as applied to a city; yet it takes us back to the same animistic period and the same class of ideas. These armies were likely to have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the ager Romanus, and therefore among spirits with whom the Romans or Iguvians, as the case might be, had no peaceful relations, and of whose ways and freaks they were in fact entirely ignorant. They must, therefore, be protected against such evil influences by some special device and ritual. Of this kind of practice Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in Golden Bough, i. 304 foll., both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. As we are dealing here with Rome only, we may content ourselves with a parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which, as it happens, Dr. Frazer has not mentioned. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring before a campaign between the severed limbs of a dog (xl. 6 init.). This only differs from the Italian plan in method, not in principle: the object in each case is to subject the whole army without exception to the salutary influence of the victim: but in Macedonia it is made to pass between the two parts of a slain victim, while in Italy the live victims are made to pass round the army, and afterwards sacrificed. That each Roman army was thus lustrated is almost certain (Dict. Ant., vol. ii. 102): in fact the word lustratio came to mean a review of troops for this reason, without religious signification: so at least we are used to take such expressions as Cicero uses of his army in Cilicia, ‘exercitum lustravi’ (Att. v. 20. 2). Even the fleets were subjected to the same process: and in Livy xxix. 27 we have a prayer addressed by Scipio to the deities of the sea before sailing for Africa, which may remind us of those used during the lustration of the people at Iguvium.

Further, at this same time, in spring, before the season of arms, all the appurtenances of the army were ‘purified’—the horses, the arms, and the trumpets. So at least we may gather from the fact that there was a festival in the oldest religious calendar at the end of February called Equirria, and another of the same name on March 14 following; though the real meaning of the word was lost in later times, this explanation is strongly suggested by the dates, and also by the place, i. e. the Campus Martius. (If this was flooded it took place on the Caelian hill.) The details of the festival, which must have included horse racing, are unfortunately lost. The Equirria of March 14 seems to correspond to a curious rite, of which the date is October 15, i.e. after the season of arms; on that day there was a two-horse chariot-race in the Campus Martius, and the near horse of the winning chariot was sacrificed to Mars, with peculiar ritual following the slaughter. It is tempting to refer this rite to a lustratio of the horses after their return from a campaign: but here again the details of a true lustratio are not forthcoming. It may have originally been, as Wissowa suggests, a cathartic rite purifying the army from the taint of bloodshed (cf. G. B. i. 332 foll.); the blood of the sacrificed horse was allowed to drip upon the sacred hearth of the Regia, and it is probable that it was used in the making of certain sacred cakes (mola salsa) of great cathartic value. But it is remarkable that this rite was not included in the festivals of the ancient calendar: we know of it only from other sources. I am inclined to hazard a guess that it belonged to a type of ceremony which the earliest pontifical legislators were unwilling to recognize; their efforts, as it seems to me, must have been directed to make the worship of the people as pure and orderly as possible.[126]

The old calendar also supplies strong evidence that the arms and the trumpets of the host were lustrated, both before and after a campaign. On March 19, called Quinquatrus, because it was the fifth day after the Ides, the ancilia, or shields of the war-priests of Mars, were thus purified; and it is a good guess that they stood for the arms of the fighting men generally. For on October 19 we find the festival Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. On that day it seems clear that both arma and ancilia were lustrated, and that the Salii for this purpose went round the armed host in a place called by the same name as the rite, in or near the Circus maximus (Varro, L.L. 6. 22: cf. 5. 153). Again, we have March 23 marked in the calendar as Tubilustrium; and though the old explanations confine these tubae to such as were used in sacris, I believe, with Wissowa, that included in these were the trumpets of the host.[127]

Lastly, we may believe that the army was purified from the taint of bloodshed after its return from a campaign, just as the Hebrew warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp after a battle (Num. xxi. 19). I have just now suggested that the sacrifice of the October horse may have originally had this object. But in Roman pontifical law the idea of the taint of bloodshed is only faintly discernible, as is also the case in the Homeric poems (Farnell, Evolution, p. 133); and the only distinct trace of it that I can find in regard to the army is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general’s car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ‘ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem’ (Fest. 117). Laurel was a powerful purgative of such taint.

I have now given some brief account of the most remarkable examples of the characteristic type of lustration in Italy, and more especially at Rome; and it only remains for me to sum up in outline what I have been saying. We began with the ideas of purification which were common to the Italians and other primitive peoples, and which have left traces here and there in the public and private ritual of the Romans, but without showing any great vital force, such as might enable them to develop into matters of religious or ethical importance in Roman life. We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice. Then we saw how this same practice was retained in the service of the State, and applied to the foundation of a city, to its land, to the circuit of its walls, to its people in the form of the men capable of carrying arms, to the horses, the arms, and the trumpets of this host.

In conclusion, I must ask the question whether this impressive ritual of lustratio ever came to have any religious or moral import for the Roman people. Undoubtedly the idea which lay at the root of it, the protection of the city and its inhabitants from hostile spirits or strange gods, disappeared from the Roman mind at an early period among the governing and better educated classes. In one point only, so far as I know, can we detect a survival of it,—namely, in the persistence of the pontifices in refusing to admit new gods within the sacred circle of the pomerium; they might be taken into the Society of Roman deities, but they must be settled in temples placed outside that boundary line. But as early as the second Punic war this old rule began to be broken, and in 205 b.c. even the mystic stone of the Magna Mater of the Phrygians was brought within the pomerium and settled in the heart of the city on the Palatine. And from that time onwards, whatever may have been the notions about such things of the ignorant Latin population, the old ideas assuredly vanished utterly from the minds of those who were in charge of the State and its religion.

Was there any transmutation of those ideas into religious beliefs which might help State or individual in the changes and chances of this mortal life? The answer to this question is a most emphatic negative. What spiritual help they needed they sought and obtained in new and foreign rites; their own solemn processions were sights to see and nothing more. Lustratio never really, in pagan Italy, developed an ethical meaning, as catharsis did to some extent in Greece.[128] And the explanation of this is a simple one; at a very early stage the State overpowered the individual, and the State religion obliterated all the germs of an individual religious conscience. Even in the cult of Jupiter, where, if anywhere, we might look for an ethical significance, this was so; ‘we do not pray to Jupiter,’ says Cicero, ‘to make us good, but to give us material benefits.’[129]

But, meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire. Then the Roman Church, with characteristic adroitness, adapted them to its own ritual, and gave them a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania major in Rogation week, not only beating the bounds as we still do in Oxford on Ascension Day, but begging a blessing on the crops and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.

OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY