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Forbidden to Enter the Ara Maxima: Dogs and Flies, Or Dogflies?*)

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Forbidden to Enter the Ara Maxima: Dogs and Flies, Or Dogflies?*) FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE ARA MAXIMA: DOGS AND FLIES, OR DOGFLIES?*) by CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL MCDONOUGH Of the numerous oddities connected with the worship of Hercules at the Ara Maxima, surely the strangest is the exclusion of ies and dogs. Pliny the Elder writes, Romae in aedem Herculis in foro Boario nec muscae nec canes intrant (HN 10.79). Solinus, who generally follows Pliny,1) expatiates upon this idea, remarking (1.11), Suo quoque numini idem Hercules instituit aram, quae maxima apud ponti ces habetur, cum se ex Nicostrate ...inmortalem conperisset. Consaeptum etiam, intra quod ritus sacrorum, factis bovicidis, docuit Potitios, sacellum in Boario foro est, in quo argumenta et convivii et maiestatis ipsius remanent. Nam divinitus neque muscis illo neque canibus ingressus est. Furthermore, Hercules likewise set up an altar to his own godhood, an altar called the Greatest by the ponti Vs, after he discovered from Nicostrate ...that he was immortal. The enclosed shrine—within which he taught the Potitii the rites of worship after the bull-sacri ce— is in the Forum Boarium, in which the signs of both his banquet and his majesty reside. For, in a divine manner, it may be entered there neither by ies or dogs. Plutarch, on the other hand,—apparently drawing on Varro,—men- tions only an exclusion of dogs, asking ( RQ 90 = Mor. 285 E-F), DiŒ tÛ tÒ „HrakleÝ ginom¡ nhw yusÛaw llon oéd¡ na yeÇn ônom‹zousin oéd¢ faÛnetai kævn ¤ntòw tÇn peribñlvn , Éw B‹rrvn ßstñrhken ;2) Why is no other god mentioned during the sacri ce to Hercules? And why is it that no dog is seen within his enclosures, as Varro records? *) A version of this paper was read at the one hundred and twenty-eighth meet- ing of the American Philological Association in Washington, D.C., December 1992. The author would like to thank especially Jerzy Linderski for his many helpful comments. 1)See John Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship I (Cambridge 1903-1909, repr. New York 1967), 214. 2)See remarks infra n. 30. ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Mnemosyne, Vol. LII, Fasc. 4 FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE ARA MAXIMA 465 As is customary in the Roman Questions , he gives no de nitive answer. The conjecture he cites, however, that the antipathy of Orthos and Cerberus to the hero lies behind the exclusion is very much mis- conceived: the use of Greek mythological argument to explain Roman cultic practice is certainly barking up the wrong tree. Despite the unconvincing explanation, Plutarch has drawn more allegiance than Pliny among scholars on this point, due perhaps to his explicit cita- tion of Varro. Both H.H. Scullard and Robert Ogilvie, for instance, refer only to the inadmissibility of dogs at the Altar, and perhaps it would be wise to follow their lead in tracking down the origin of this ritual curiosity. 3) Dogs are kept away from the Ara Maxima, our sources speci cally state; why they should be there in the rst place, however, we might legitimately ask. There is evidence that some temples employed watch-dogs in antiquity: the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, for exam- ple, kept a number of such dogs which, though ordinarily quite menacing, would greet Scipio Africanus fondly when he approached the temple (Gell. NA 6.1.6).4) From the failure of these dogs to alert the city during the Gauls’ invasion, Pliny asserts ( HN 29.57), arosethe bizarre ritual of canine cruci xion held annually in August: his asser- tion is wrong, of course, but the assumption of watch-dogs in the temple is of interest to us here. 5) Similarly, in his elegy of the treach- erous Tarpeia (4.4.84), Propertius imagines vocales canes slain by Tatius upon gaining access to the citadel (though the temple to Jupiter Capitolinus would not be built until the reign of Tarquin the Proud). Outside of Rome, we know of dogs kept in the temple precincts of Asclepius in Epidaurus, by whose licking cures were occasionally e Vected (IG 4.951-952; cf. Ael. NA 8.9); we know too 3)H.H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (Ithaca 1981), 172, and R.M. Ogilvie, The Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus (London 1969),47. 4)See J. Aymard, Scipion L’Africain et les Chiens de Capitole , REL 31 (1953), 111- 116. On watch-dogs more generally, see Jocelyn M.C. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Art and Life (Ithaca 1973), 107-108. On dogs of metal and other materials serving as apotropeia in front of temples and residences, see Christopher A. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses (Oxford 1992), 18-26. 5)On the canine cruci xion, see too Serv. ad Aen. 8.652 and Johan. Lydus Mens. 4.114. Cf. Scullard ( supra n. 3), 170 & 252 n. 212. The sacri ce of the dogs is surely to be compared with those performed in Hekate’s honor, cf. Plut. RQ 52 (= Mor. 277 B), RQ 68 (= Mor. 280 C), & RQ 111 (= Mor. 281 D)..
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