to one another: hence there is no Roman mythology. Yet, all
powerful in their individual spheres of action, they can influence the
fortunes of men and can enter into relations with them. The
primary attitude of man to the numina seems clearly to be one
of fear, which survives prominently in the “impish” character of
certain of the spirits of the countryside, such as Faunus and Inuus,
and is always seen in the underlying conception of religio, a sense of
awe in the presence of a superhuman power. But the practical
mind of the Roman gives this relation a legal turn: the ius sacrum,
which regulates the dealings of men with the divine powers, is an
inseparable part of ius publicum, the body of civil law, and the
various acts of worship, prayer and thanksgiving are conceived of
under the legal aspect of a contract. The base-notion is that the
spirits, if they are given their due, will make a return to man: the
object of the recurring annual festivals is to propitiate them and
forestall any hostile intention by putting them, as it were, in debt to
man—more rarely to express gratitude for benefits received.
In such a religion exactness, of ritual must play a large part—so large, indeed, that many modern critics have been Ritual. misled into regarding the Roman religion as a mere network of formalities, without any background of genuine religious feeling. This formalism shows itself in many ways. It is necessary in the first place to make quite certain that the right deity is being addressed: hence it is well to invoke all the spirits who might be concerned, and even to add a general formula to cover omissions: here we have the ritual significance of the indigitamenta. Place, again, as we have seen, was an essential element even in the conception of the numen, and is therefore all-important in ritual. So, too, is the character of the offering: male victims must be sacrificed to male deities; female victims to goddesses: white animals are the due of the di superi, the gods of the upper world, black animals of the gods below. Special deities, moreover, will demand special victims, while the more rustic numina, such as Pales (q.v.), should be given milk and millet cakes rather than a blood-offering. All-important, too, is the order of ceremonial and the formula of prayer: a mistake or omission or an unpropitious interruption may vitiate the whole ritual, and though such misfortunes may occasionally be expiated by the additional offering of a piaculum, in more serious cases the whole ceremony must be recommenced ab initio. Herein lies the importance of the priesthood: the priest is not, as in other religions, the mediator between god and man, but on the one hand for the purpose of state-worship the chosen representative of the whole people, on the other the repository of tradition and ritual lore.
This conception of the nature of the numina and man's relation to them is the root notion of the old Roman religion, Household worship. and the fully-formed state cult of the di indigetes even at the earliest historical period, must have been the result of long and gradual development, of which we can to a certain extent trace the stages. The original settlement on the Palatine, like its neighbour on the Quirinal, was an agricultural community, whose unit both from the legal and religious point of view was not the individual but the household. The household is thus at once the logical starting-point of religious cult, and throughout Roman history the centre of its most real and vital activity. The head of the house (paterfamilias) is the natural priest and has control of the domestic worship: he is assisted by his sons as acolytes (camilli) and deputes certain portions of the ritual to his wife and daughters and even to his bailiff (vilicus) and his bailiff's wife. The worship centres round certain numina, the spirits indwelling in the sacred places of the original round hut in which the family lived. Janus, the god of the door, comes undoubtedly first, though unfortunately we know but little of his worship in the household, except that it was the concern of the men. To the women is committed the worship of the “blazing hearth,” Vesta, the natural centre of the family life, and it is noticeable that even to Ovid (Fast. vi. 291-92) the conception of Vesta was still material and not anthropomorphic. The Penates (q.v.) were the numina of the store-cupboard, at first vague and animistic, but later on, as the definite deus-notion was developed, identified with certain of the other divinities of household or state religion.
To these numina of the sacred places must be added two other important conceptions, that of the Lar familiaris and the Genius. Lar and Genius. The Lar familiaris has been regarded[1] as the embodiment of all the family dead and his cult as a consummation of ancestor-worship, but a more probable explanation regards him as one of the Lares (q.v., numina of the fields worshipped at the compita, the places where properties marched) who had special charge of the house or possibly of the household servants (familia); for it is significant that his worship was committed to the charge of the vilica. The Genius is originally the “spirit of developed manhood,” the numen which is attached to every man and represents the sum total of his powers and faculties as the Juno does of the woman: each individual worships his own Genius on his birthday, but the household-cult is concerned with the Genius of the paterfamilias. The established worship of the household then represents the various members of the family and the central points of the domestic activity; but we find also in the ordinary religious life of the family a more direct connexion with morality and a greater religious sense than in any other part of the Roman cult. The family meal is sanctified by the offering of a portion of the food to the household numina: the chief events in the individual life, birth, infancy, puberty, marriage, are all marked by religious ceremonial, in some cases of a distinctively primitive character. The dead, too, though it is doubtful whether in early times they were actually worshipped, at any rate have a religious commemoration as in some sense still members of the family.
The next stage in the logical development of the state religion should naturally be found in the worship of the gens, Agricultural worship. the aggregate of households belonging to one clan, but our information about the gentile worship is so scanty and uncertain[2] that we cannot make practical use of it. It is more profitable to turn from the life of the household to the outdoor occupations of the fields, where the early Roman settler met with his neighbours to celebrate the various stages of the agricultural year in religious ceremonies which afterwards became the festivals of the state calendar. Here we have a series of celebrations representing the occupations of the successive seasons, addressed sometimes to numina who developed later on into the great gods of the state, such as Jupiter, Mars or Ceres, sometimes to vaguer divinities who remained always indefinite and rustic in character, such as Pales and Consus. Sometimes again, as in the case of the Lupercalia (q.v.), the attribution is so indefinite that it is hard to discover who was the special deity concerned; in other cases, such as those of the Robigalia and the Meditrinalia, the festival seems at first to have been addressed generally to any interested numina and only later to have developed an eponymous deity of its own. Roughly we may distinguish three main divisions of the calendar year, the festivals of Spring, of the Harvest and of Winter, preserving on the whole their peculiar characteristics. (1) In the Spring (it must be remembered that the old Roman calendar began the year with March) we have ceremonials of anticipation and prayer for the crops to come: prominent among them are the Fordicidia, with its symbolic slaughter of pregnant cows, addressed to Tellus, the Cerealia, a prayer-service to Ceres for the corn-crop, and the most important of the rustic celebrations of lustration and propitiation, the Parilia, the festival of Pales. To these must be added the Ambarvalia (q.v.), the lustration of the fields, a movable feast (and therefore not found in the calendars) addressed at first to Mars in his original agricultural character (see Mars). (2) Of the Harvest festivals the most significant are the twin celebrations on August 21st and 25th to the divinity-pair Consus and Ops, who are both concerned with the storing of the year's produce, and two mysterious vintage festivals, the Vinalia Rustica and the Meditrinalia, connected originally with Jupiter. (3) The Winter festivals are less homogeneous in character, but we may distinguish among them certain undoubtedly agricultural celebrations, the Saturnalia (at first connected with the sowing of the next year's crop, but afterwards overlaid with Greek ceremonial), and a curious repetition of the harvest festivals to Consus and Ops.
