Digitized by Microsoft® ?A ?12 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by Microsoft® r' 9.^t^ Cornell University Library PA 2027.F78 Roman essays and interpretations 3 1924 021 608 975 Due ^ fi^^^mdm fiPPalo-aseHt LOA IV 200i- Digitized by Microsoft® This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation witli Cornell University Libraries, 2007. You may use and print this copy in limited quantity for your personal purposes, but may not distribute or provide access to it (or modified or partial versions of it) for revenue-generating or other commercial purposes. Digitized by Microsoft® ROMAN ESSAYS AND INTERPRETATIONS By W. WARDE FOWLER M.A. HON. Lh.D. EDINBURGH, ^c. Author of The Roman Festivals of the Republic, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, The Religious Experi'mce of the Roman People, Rom^n Ideas of Deity in the Last Century of the Repiiblic, &c. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1 920 Digitized by Microsoft® OXFOKD UNIVEKSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YOEK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILPORD PUELISUER TO THE UHTVERSITY /i7f/7GI Digitized by Microsoft® PREFATORY NOTE I HAVE included in this selection of papers none that were simply critical of the work of others : only those in which I seemed to myself, rightly or wrongly, to be moving towards some fairly definite conclusion on points of permanent interest. Should I be criticized for including some short and apparently trifling papers which I have called ' parallela quaedam ', I should reply that I like to show that the apparently marvellous may be sometimes wholly or in part authenticated by modern parallels. At the end I have placed character sketches of two great Roman historians, Niebuhr and Mommsen, and an essay on the Julius Caesar of Shakespeare. Whether I am right in reprinting and revising papers, many of which were written long ago, the critics will decide. I can only say that they are fragments of work into which I have put my best abilities, and in the writing of which I have found much pleasure, whether in the hurry of a busy tutorial life at Oxford, or in the leisure of old age in the country. I have to acknowledge gratefully the permission of the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and of the Council of the Classical Association, to reprint papers originally published in their Journals, A considerable part of the material of the volume has not been published before. I am greatly indebted to my old friend Mr. P. E. Matheson for kind help in reading the proofs. W. W. F. KiNGHAM, June 19, 1919. A 2 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CONTENTS PART I PAGE The Latin History of the woed Religio. (TransacUons the Congress of for the History of Religions, 1908) . 7 The Original Meaning of the word Sacer. {J. R. 8., 1911) 15 MxjNDUs Patet. (/. R. S., 1912) . • . - „ 24 The Oak and the Thunder-god .... 37 The Religious Meaning of the Toga Peaetexta of Roman Children 42 Was the Plaminica Dialis priestess of Juno ? (CI. Rev., 1895) 52 The Origin of the Lar familiaris .... 56 FoRTUNA Primigenia 64 Passing under the Yoke. {CI. Rev., 1913) . 70 Note on privately dedicated Roman Altars . 75 The Pontifices and the Periae : the Law of Rest- days ......... 79 PART II On the Date of the Rhetorica ad Herennium . 91 The Lex frumentaria of Gaius Gracchus. {E. H. R., 1905) . 99 The Carmen saeculare of Horace and its First Per- formance. (CI. Qu., 1910) Ill On the Laudatio Turiae and its Additional Frag- ments. (CI Rev., 1905) 126 An Unnoticed Trait in the Character of Julius Caesar. (CI. Rev.j 1916) 138 Digitized by Microsoft® . 6 CONTENTS PART III PAGE Ancient Italy and Modern Boeneo. (J. B. S., 1916) 146 Parallbla quaedam : . • • • .165 The plague of locusts in 125, and a modern parallel 165 Plagues of field-voles in ancient and modern times 167 ' parallel 169 Armati terram exercent ' : and a modern The disappearance of the earliest Latin poetry : and a modern parallel . • .171 Roman Leges datae and English Enclosure awards 173 The Geeat Seepent oe the River Bagradas . 178 PART IV Vergiliana : The Swans in Aen. i. 390 ff. The Harbour in iii. 633-6. Note on Dido and Aeneas, Aen. v. 5-6. On the word nefas in v. 197. Notes on Aen. ix, x, and xi 181 Notes on Horace, Odes, iii. 1-6 .... 210 Beethold Georg Niebtjhr : a sketch . 229 Theodor Mommsen : his life and work . 250 The Tragic Element in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 268 INDEX OF LATIN WORDS AND PHRASES . 289 Digitized by Microsoft® THE LATIN HISTORY OF THE WORD RELIGIO This word, which in its modern form is in use all over Europe, had a remarkable history in its own Latin speech and literature. That history seems to me to have more than a mere linguistic interest, and I propose in this paper to indi- cate in outline where that interest lies. Of the much disputed etymology of the word I will only say this : that the question stands now very much as it did in the time of Cicero and Lucretius, who took conflicting views of it. Professor Conway, whose authority is great, tells me that apart from the evidence of usage and the feeling of the Romans themselves, there is nothing to decide whether it is to be connected with ligare, to bind, as Lucretius thought, or with legere, to string together, arrange, as Cicero believed. His feeling is in favour of Cicero's is view, as less prejudiced than that of Lucretius ; so mine. But our feelings are not of much account in such questions, and I may pass on at once to the history of the word. • In Latin literature down to Christian times, religio is used in a great variety of senses, and often in most curious and think, be reduced unexpected ones ; but all these uses can, I to two main types of meaning, one of which is probably the older, the other derivative. The one reflects the natural feeling of the Latin when face to face with the supernormal or supernatural, before the State with its priesthoods and religious law had intervened to quiet that feeling. The other expresses the attitude of the citizen of a State towards the supernatural, now realizable without fear or doubt in the shape of the recognized deities of his State. I must explain these two uses to begin with. doubt, or fear, I. Religio is the feeling of awe, anxiety, cannot be which is aroused in the mind by something that explained by a man's experience or by the natural course of Digitized by Microsoft® 8 THE LATIN HISTORY OF cause and efEact, and which is therefore referred to the super- natural. This I take to be the original meaning of the word, for the following reasons : 1. Religio is not a word which has grown out of any State usage, or been rendered technical by priestly law or ritual. It has no part in the ius divinum, like the word sacrum : we search for it in vain in the indices to the Corpus Inscriptionum, where it would inevitably be found if it were used in a technical or legal sense. In its adjectival form, as applied to times and - places, we may also see the results of this non-technical m Baning. Dies religiosi, loca religiosa, are not days and places which are proclaimed as such by the official administrators of the ius divinum : they are rather such days and places as man's own feeling, indep3ndently of the State and its officials, has made the object of religio. ' Religiosum stands in contrast with sacrum as indicating something about which there is awe, fear, scruple, and which has not been definitely brought within the province of State law, nor handed over to a deity by ritualistic formulae.' ^ If this be so, then we may safely refer the origin of the word to a pjriod when powerful State priesthoods had not as yet, by ritual and routine, soothed down the natural awe which in less perfect social forms man feels when obstructed, astonished, embarrassed, by that which he cannot explain or overcome. 2. That this is the true and the oldest meaning of the word seems also proved by the fact that it survived in this sense throughout Latin literature, and was indeed so used by the ordinary Roman layman. It is familiar to us in a thousand passages. Religio may stand for a doubt or scruple of any kind, or for anything uncanny which creates such doubt or scruple. To illustrate this I may select a single passage from Caesar, as a writer who would be sure to use a word in a sense obvious to every one. In describing the alarm of the soldiers of Q. Cicero when besieged at Aduatuca, he says : Alius castra iam capta pronuntiat, alius deleto exereitu atque imperatore victores barbaros venisse contendit ; pleri- ' See a paper by the writer in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 847. Digitized by Microsoft® — THE WORD RELIQIO 9 que novas sibi ex loco religiones fingunt, Cottaeque et Titurii calamitatem, qui in eodem occiderint castello, ante oculos ponunt.^ Here Caesar might almost as well have simply written metus instead of religiones ; but he wishes to express not only natural fear and alarm as to what may happen, but that fear accentuated by the sense of something wrong or uncanny, for which the soldiers or their leaders may be responsible in this case the pitching of a camp in a place which they believed to have been the scene of a former disaster.