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Ritual Cleaning-Up of the City: from the Lupercalia to the Argei*

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Ritual Cleaning-Up of the City: from the Lupercalia to the Argei* RITUAL CLEANING-UP OF THE CITY: FROM THE LUPERCALIA TO THE ARGEI* This paper is not an analysis of the fine aspects of ritual, myth and ety- mology. I do not intend to guess the exact meaning of Luperci and Argei, or why the former sacrificed a dog and the latter were bound hand and foot. What I want to examine is the role of the festivals of the Lupercalia and the Argei in the functioning of the Roman community. The best-informed among ancient writers were convinced that these were purification cere- monies. I assume that the ancients knew what they were talking about and propose, first, to establish the nature of the ritual cleanliness of the city, and second, see by what techniques the two festivals achieved that goal. What, in the perception of the Romans themselves, normally made their city unclean? What were the ordinary, repetitive sources of pollution in pre-Imperial Rome, before the concept of the cura Urbis was refined? The answer to this is provided by taboos and restrictions on certain sub- stances, and also certain activities, in the City. First, there is a rule from the Twelve Tables with Cicero’s curiously anachronistic comment: «hominem mortuum», inquit lex in duodecim, «in urbe ne sepelito neve urito», credo vel propter ignis periculum (De leg. II 58). Secondly, we have the edict of the praetor L. Sentius C.f., known from three inscrip- tions dating from the beginning of the first century BC1: L. Sentius C. f. pr(aetor) de sen(atus) sent(entia) loca terminanda coer(avit). b(onum) f(actum). nei quis intra terminos proprius urbem ustrinam fecisse velit neive [838, 2981: nive] * This article is an expanded version of a paper I read at the colloquium «Pollution and the Ancient City», held in September 1995 at Exeter University. It grew at my seminar at the University of Warsaw and achieved its final form after being presented at the Università di Perugia, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Université Paris IV — La Sorbonne. I wish to thank all my students and colleagues who commented on it for their advice and their criticism. Special thanks go to Benedetto Bravo, Hans Hauben and Peter Wiseman. Journal abbreviations are those of L’Année Philologique. LTUR refers to E.M. STEINBY (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, Roma 1993–. Any other abbrevia- tions should be self-explanatory. 1 CIL XII 838 (= VI 31614), 839 (= VI 31615), 2981. 192 A. ZIOLKOWSKI stercus cadaver iniecisse velit [838: iniecise] Finally, in Festus’ mutilated entry on the ludi Tauri the reason for holding them in the Circus Flaminius is given as: <ne> intra muros evocentur d<i inferi> (478L). In urbe in the Twelve Tables is the exact equivalent of Festus’ intra muros; so is, ideally, Sentius’ intra terminos proprius urbem, even if in his edict a buffer zone has been created between the limits of the City proper and the area where depositing waste and corpses is permitted (his cippi were found ca. 200 metres from the Servian Wall). The borderline of the City was thus a sort of sanitary cordon which kept out the following polluting agents. First, filth in the ordinary sense of the word: excrements, garbage and carcasses. The way of dealing with such ‘physical’ sources of pollution was simple: removal of the offending substances from the City2. This hygienic aspect is charmingly revealed in an addendum painted in tiny letters at the bottom of one of Sentius’ inscriptions: stercus longe aufer ne malum habeas (CIL XII 839). Homines mortui were dealt with in the same way, by means of the ban on burials within the city, though in this case the reason was clearly of ritual nature. Thus, judging from aforementioned taboos, in historical times the ritual sources of pollution of the City were corpses and other human remains — skeletons, ashes — and, ostensibly, infernal deities. Of course, gods themselves, even infernal, were not a source of pollu- tion; eg. Rome did not require special cleansing after the days when the mundus was open. But ghosts of the dead which swarmed around them were: di manes but, at the same time, larvae and lemures. Human remains were a source of pollution for the same reason: one only needs to recall the propitiatory ceremonies kept year after year to assuage the victims of ritual murders, the pairs of Greeks and Gauls buried alive in the Forum Boarium and the Vestals condemned to the undergound chamber of the campus sceleratus3. The main source of ritual pollution of the City were thus ghosts of the dead. In other words, the ritual cleanliness of Rome consisted essentially in its being free from the ghosts of the dead. If it was so, then the critical period of the year, as far as the City’s rit- ual cleanliness was concerned, should have been the two feasts of the dead, when ghosts of dead ancestors walked abroad, the Parentalia (13-21 2 J. BODEL, Graveyards and Groves. A Study of the Lex Lucerina, AJAH 11 (1994), p. 30-54. 3 A. FRASCHETTI, Le sepolture rituali del Foro Boario, in Le délit religieux dans la cité antique (CollEFR, 48), Rome 1981, p. 51-115, esp. 72-78. FROM THE LUPERCALIA TO THE ARGEI 193 February) and the Lemuria (9-13 May). Both were of paramount impor- tance, necessary yet extremely dangerous since they provided the dead with an opportunity to roam the world of the living, and especially the sacred space of the Urbs. It is thus only logical to expect the main purifi- cation rites — whose object was the whole City, whether the community or the space it inhabited — to have taken place around these two periods. In effect, during the Parentalia, on February 15, we duly find the purification festival of Lupercalia, so important that according to Varro it gave name to the month in which it was celebrated: Ad hos qui additi … posterior, ut idem dicunt scriptores, ab diis inferis Februarius appellatus, quod tum his paren[te]tur; ego magis arbitror Februarium a die februato, quod tum februatus populus, id est Lupercis nudis lustratur antiquum oppidum Palatinum gregibus huma- nis cinctum (LL VI 34). Similarly, in May, just after the Lemuria, the rite of the Argei was cele- brated, a ceremony which Plutarch declared ö mégistov t¬n kaqarm¬n (Quaest. Rom. 86). What has not, in my opinion, been sufficiently emphasized is that, judg- ing from the evidence at our disposal, our two feasts were the only regular, annually observed ceremonies of purification of the City. The Armilustrium and the Tubilustrium concerned only a part of the community; the Ambar- valia, if identical with the festival of the Fratres Arvales, were a lustration of the ager Romanus. The city itself — as far as we know — was lustrated twice a year through the rites of the Lupercalia and the Argei. Before getting to the gist of the problem — techniques of keeping the city ritually clean — I would like to comment on a widely shared view that a lustratio consisted essentially in some sort of a procession around the object of purification. That view, for example, can be found in Daniel Harmon’s comment on Agnes Michels’ ground-breaking article on the Lupercalia4: «Michels’ study has shown that the rite was not the typical lustratio, in which the victims were sacrificed after having been led in procession to form a magic circle»5. As can be seen, this scholar at least is convinced that a typical lustration should have included ‘beat- ing the bounds’ or, as Michels derisively put it, «a procession of victims around something»6. A similar view is expressed by Peter Wiseman: 4 A.K. MICHELS, Lupercalia: The Topography and Interpretation of the Lupercalia, TAPhA 84 (1953), p. 35-59.. 5 D.P. HARMON, The Public Festivals of Rome, in ANRW II 16.2, Berlin – New York 1978, p. 1440-1468, esp. 1443. 6 A.K. MICHELS, art. cit. (n. 4), p. 37. 194 A. ZIOLKOWSKI «Varro … calls the run [of the Luperci] a lustratio of the Palatine city, which ought to imply an encirclement»7. It does not seem, however, that our sources a priori justify this view. First of all, in a discussion of the techniques the Romans used to keep the city ritually clean, it is better to abandon preconceived ideas implanted by anthropologists and concentrate on evidence of strictly Roman prove- nance. The only known Roman beating of the bounds, the ritual of Ambarvalia, concerned private fields and/or the ager Romanus antiquus. As for the obscure Amburbium, whose very name (urbem ambire) sug- gests beating the bounds of the city, and which is sometimes thought of as a regular, though moveable, Roman festival, its celebration in 49 BC, recorded by Lucan, was according to him an ad hoc measure, advised by an Etruscan haruspex8. Its only other celebration is recorded under AD 271 by the Historia Augusta (Aurel. 20.3), not a very faith-inspiring source, again at a time of exceptional danger. The lustrum of the citizenry-at-arms in completion of the census, which in fact consisted in leading a bull, a boar and a ram around the classis and then purifying the latter with the sacrifice of the former, hardly lends itself to serve as the basis for gener- alizing, having been so exotic a ritual as to warrant a description not only by Dionysios (Ant. IV 22.1-2) but by Livy as well (I 44.1-2). Besides, no matter what we think of Theodor Mommsen’s inference from the phrase lustrum condere that each performance thereof ‘founded’ the citi- zen body anew9, the said ‘founding’ took place in the middle of the Cam- pus Martius, far enough from the City to require spatial determination of the object of purification at each repetition of the ceremony.
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