Indo-European Sacred Space
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Roger D. Woodard Indo-European Sacred Space t r a d i t i o n s INDO-EUROPEAN SACRED SPACE SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 1 6/7/06 3:21:31 PM GENERAL EDITOR Gregory Nagy Harvard University EDITORIAL BOARD Olga M. Davidson Wellesley College Bruce Lincoln University of Chicago Alexander Nehamas Princeton University A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 2 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM Indo-European Sacred Space VEDIC AND ROMAN CULT ROGER D. WOODARD UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS URBANA AND CHICAGO SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 3 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. C 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woodard, Roger D. Indo-European sacred space : Vedic and Roman cult / Roger D. Woodard. p. cm. -- (Traditions) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-252-02988-2 (isbn 13 cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-252-02988-7 (isbn 10 cloth : alk. paper) 1. Indo-Europeans--Religion. 2. Rome--Religion. 3. India--Religion. 4. Mythology, Roman. 5. Mythology, Indic. 6. Sacred space. I. Title. II. Series: Traditions (Urbana, Ill.) BL660.W66 2006 200’.89’09--dc22 2005017055 SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 4 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM To the memory of James Wilson Poultney Colleague, Mentor, Friend SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 5 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 6 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xi . The Minor Capitoline Triad 2. Terminus 59 3. Into the Teacup 96 4. The Fourth Fire 42 5. From the Inside Out 24 Postscript 269 Abbreviations 27 Bibliography 277 Index 285 SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 7 6/7/06 3:21:32 PM SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 8 6/7/06 3:21:33 PM C HPREFACE A P T E R 1 Indo-European Sacred Space is a work about two particular bounded spaces—one small, one great—used in the practice of the ancestral Indo- European religion. The focus of the study falls squarely upon the reflexes of those spaces as they survived in two Indo-European descendent cultures, one lying on the western margin of the area of Indo-European expansion in antiquity, the other on the eastern. In the west, the small cultic ground survives as the space of urban Rome, bounded by the pomerium; and the large, as the vast arena which lies between the pomerium and the distal boundary of the Ager Romanus. Comparable spaces, of common origin, are found within the cult of Vedic India; and as on other occasions, the well- attested Vedic structures and usages have much to reveal about Roman cult. Both in terms of scholarly history and theory, my starting point for this investigation is Georges Dumézil’s model of Roman religion, developed vis-à-vis the overarching threefold ideology of Proto-Indo-European society. One of the objectives of the present work is thus to present a clear and concise summary of Dumézil’s arguments for the survival of ancient Indo-European ideology in early Roman religion; this is the principal, but not exclusive, focus of chapter 1. A second and more important objective is to jump forward from that Dumézilian platform and to offer a new understanding of Roman and, more generally, primitive Indo-European religious structures and phenomena; one that goes beyond and, in some instances, differs appreciably from Dumézil’s own interpretations. The work which is presented herein therefore marks a beginning—certainly not a fait accompli. Dumézil is not the only eminent twentieth-century scholar of the classical and Indo-European disciplinae with whom this work is connected. Another is my former Johns Hopkins colleague, James Wilson Poultney. It is as a dedication to the memory of his life, his friendship, and his always uncompromising standards of scholarly excellence that I offer this work, and but hope it to be a suitable offering. ix SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 9 6/7/06 3:21:33 PM SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 10 6/7/06 3:21:33 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many are those to whom I am indebted for assistance, advice, and support in the preparation of this work. All cannot be named, but I would be remiss not to express special thanks to a few: to Gregory Nagy, editor of this series, for his friendship and support; to Willis Regier and his staff at the University of Illinois Press, for their excellent professionalism and guidance; to Chris Dadian of the Center for Hellenic Studies for his invaluable aid with the manuscript; to N. J. Allen of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University, for his wisdom, expertise, and much more; to my collaborator A. J. Boyle and Penguin Books for their kind permission to utilize translations from our Ovid: Fasti (2004). My indebtedness to Katherine and Paul far exceeds what mere words of mortal tongue can convey. I wish also to express my heartfelt appreciation to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Buffalo for generously providing a subsidy to support the publication of this work. xi SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 11 6/7/06 3:21:33 PM xii TEXT SSIE_frontmatter_FA.indd 12 6/7/06 3:21:33 PM C H A P T E R 1 The Minor Capitoline Triad 1.1 INTRODUCTION This first chapter lays a foundation for the rest of the book that follows. Much, therefore, of what appears in chapter 1 is review and restatement, but with some new ideas and interpretations applied. Even among the old ideas, however, some concepts and methods will likely be unfamiliar to a subset of readers. These include basic notions about the tripartition of Proto-Indo-European society—ideas readily associated with, among other scholars, Émile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil. The latter author’s inter- pretation of the survival of a prehistoric tripartite ideology in the attested mythic and religious systems of various Indo-European peoples of antiqui- ty is also fundamental here, and the Romans are the most notable of these ancient peoples for the present chapter. We will examine the evidence for a Pre-Capitoline triad (following Wissowa), Dumézil’s interpretation of that triad vis-à-vis Indo-European ideology, and its replacement by the Capitoline triad. 1.2 THE FOUNDING OF THE CAPITOLIUM That Greek historian of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, tells us that the monarch Tarquinius Priscus, at war with the Sabines, vowed to Jupiter SSIE_ch1_FA.indd 1 6/8/06 10:39:11 AM 2 INDO-EUROPEAN SACRED SPACE the building of a great temple (Ant. Rom. 3.69.1–2).1 The vow was not, how- ever, fulfilled in his lifetime; it fell to his eventual successor, Tarquinius Superbus, to lay the foundations and build upon them the opulent temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (though Livy [1.38.7] asserts that the founda- tions had been laid by the elder Tarquinius). Tarquinius Superbus would not himself see the temple finished, continues Dionysius; not until three years after the king’s expulsion would the project be brought to comple- tion by the consuls who then held office.2 In order to determine the proper location for Jupiter’s new temple, Tar- quinius3 summoned Augures, and these divined that the structure was to be built upon the Capitoline hill. That hill, however, was already cluttered with altars dedicated to many other deities; so the Augures took further auspices to determine whether the various divinities concerned would be amenable to having their own altars removed from that space for the con- struction of Jupiter’s temple. All the gods were willing except two: Juven- tas, goddess of the iuvenes, and Terminus, god of boundaries—both refused to budge, in spite of much entreaty on the part of the Augures (Ant. Rom. 3.69.3–5).4 Consequently, altars to each were in the end incorporated with- 1The author wishes to express his appreciation to Arethusa and the Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing the incorporation of some ideas and elements from Woodard (2002) into the present work. 2With regard to Livy’s record of a two-stage building program, it is interesting to note Holloway’s (1994) remarks concerning the size of the blocks in the temple’s foundations. Beginning with the twelfth of the fifteen courses of the foundations, the tuffa blocks become 8 to 10 cm thicker, leading Holloway (p. 8) to suggest the hypothesis of an interrupted construction project. If the foundations themselves were laid in two stages, a reasonable harmonizing of the discrepancy of Dionysius and Livy (and their annalistic sources) on this point becomes possible (the foundation was begun by the elder Tarquin and finished by the younger, who then continued with construction of the temple). Holloway, however, courts the notion of these temple foundations being early fourth century; he notes the existence in the early fourth century of one Marcus Horatius, a military tribune (Livy 6.31.2, 5), and tentatively suggests that some inscriptional record of his name might be the source of the tradition that it was the consul Marcus Horatius Pulvillus (Livy 2. 8.6–8) who dedicated the temple in the early days of the Republic. These foundations would hence be much later than the period of the Tarquins. Concerning this “behemoth among the temples of Etruria and Latium” (p. 8), he writes, “The project for the temple may well belong to the kings of the sixth century. But even so, their resources were not sufficient to carry the work forward” (p.