Plutarch's Romane Questions - Plutarch

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The Subject of the "Romane Questions" and of this Introduction.

      The "fashions and customes of Rome," which prompted Plutarch's questions, are directly or indirectly associated with the worship of the gods, while the solutions which he suggests contain occasionally myths. It is not, however, all Roman gods, cults, and myths that are discussed by Plutarch: he limits himself, on the whole, to those which are purely Roman, or rather purely Italian. This limitation is not accidental, and it is significant. It does not indeed appear that Plutarch designed to confine himself thus: the fact seems rather to be that, long before his time, the Romans had borrowed the myths, the ritual, and the gods of Greece, and that Plutarch, as a Greek, found nothing strange or unintelligible in the resemblances which the Roman ritual of his day bore to the religion of his native land. It was the points of difference which caught his attention.

      And here we must note a further limitation of the subject of the Romane Questions and of this Introduction. Surprise and inquiry are excited not by the familiar, but by the unusual; so Plutarch's attention was arrested not by customs which, though purely Italian, were universal in Italy, e.g., the practice of covering the head during worship, but by fashions for which he could find no analogy or parallel in the stage of religion with which alone he was acquainted. In such isolated customs, out of harmony with their surroundings, modern science sees "survivals" from an earlier stage of culture; and it is as survivals that they will be treated in this Introduction. Now, the stage of religion with which Plutarch was familiar, and in which he could find no analogies for those "fashions and customes," was polytheism; and if those practices are survivals, they must be survivals from a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.

      Here, however, a difficulty meets us. If the teaching of the Solar Mythologists be true, the Aryans, having a mythology, were already polytheists: much more, therefore, must the Italians have been polytheists from the beginning. I am sorry to say that I cannot meet this difficulty: I can only frankly warn the reader that it exists. But in an Introduction which professes to confine itself to myths and cults which are purely Italian, it is impossible to discuss Solar Mythology, for the simple reason that there is no such thing in existence as an Italian solar myth, or indeed Nature-myth of any kind. The only story which is seriously claimed as a Nature-myth is that of Hercules and Cacus. Cacus, a monster or giant, stole some cows from Hercules, and hid them in his cave. Hercules discovered them, according to some accounts, by the aid of Caca, the sister of Cacus, according to other accounts, by the lowing which the cows in the cave set up when Hercules went by with the rest of his oxen. Hercules forced his way into the cave, and, in spite of the fire and flames which Cacus spat at him, killed the monster with his club. Then Hercules, in commemoration of the discovery of his cattle, erected an altar to Jupiter the Discoverer (Jupiter Inventor). Now a similar story, it would appear, is to be found in the Vedas. Vritra, a three-headed snake, steals cows from Indra, who discovers them in a cave by their lowing, and kills Vritra with a club. And the Vaidic story must be a Nature-myth, because the Vedas expressly explain that the cows are clouds, the lowing is thunder, the club is the lightning, and Indra, on this occasion, the blue sky. But why is the interpretation given by the Vaidic philosophers to be accepted without examination, when we reject the teaching of the Stoics, who interpreted Rhea as matter, and Zeus, Posidon, and Hades as fire, water, and air respectively, in accordance with the Stoic philosophy of the universe? I submit it as a possibility, worth consideration at least, that we have here an ordinary folk-tale: the trick of using the bulls to make the cows reveal their hiding-place is like the trick in the folk-tale about the groom of Darius who caused his master's horse to neigh and so secured the Persian empire to Darius. The story may have been told of some clever fellow (not necessarily or probably of a god) in pro-ethnic Aryan times, or it may have been hit on by Hindoo and Italian story-tellers independently. Once invented, however, it was used by each of these two peoples in a characteristic manner. The learned Roman, whose object was to explain the origin of the customs, cults, institutions, &c., of Rome, seized on it as the obvious explanation of two facts which required explanation, viz., first, how the altar to Jupiter Inventor came into existence; and second, why the offering made in gratitude for the recovery of lost property, was an ox. The learned Hindoo, on the other hand, had the satisfaction of showing that even the stories with which (alone or chiefly) the common people were acquainted bore unsuspected witness to the truth of the religion he taught. But to return to our interpretation of the "fashions and customes" of Rome as survivals of a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.

      A second difficulty remains. Distinguished writers on the philosophy of religion hold that polytheism is not developed out of fetichism or animism, but is primitive and underived from any earlier stage. The survivals, then, which Plutarch records, could not point to the existence of an earlier stage. Here, again, it is not for me to handle such high themes as the philosophy of religion. I am bound down to the humbler task of noting the simple fact that, until borrowed from Hellas, polytheism was unknown in Italy.

      This is a very bare statement—so naked as almost to amount to a literary impropriety. I must, therefore, take three sections to clothe it.

      II. Italian Gods.

      That some of the great gods of Rome were but Greek gods borrowed is universally admitted (see e.g. Mommsen's History of Rome, i. 186 ff., or Ihne, i. 119). Even so strong a supporter of the theory of a Græco-Italian period as Roscher admits unreservedly that the mythology, worship, and the very name of Apollo were borrowed in early but still historic times (Lexikon, i. 446). When, then, we find Plutarch putting the question why the temples of Æsculapius and Vulcan were built outside Rome (Romane Questions, 94 and 47), we at once surmise that these were imported gods, whose worship was indeed sanctioned and ordained by the Roman State but was not admitted within the sacred circle of the pomœrium, reserved for the temples of indigenous Roman gods. In the case of Æsculapius we have historical proof that his was an imported worship; in consequence of a pestilence in Rome in B.C. 293 the god was fetched from Epidaurus, and the temple in question was erected two years afterwards.[1] We do not happen to have any similar historical record of the introduction of Vulcan's worship, but the name of the god, be it Cretan or Etruscan, is foreign.[2]

      Having eliminated these and other loan-gods, we find that the genuine Italian deities which remain fall into two classes. The one class consists of such abstractions as Forculus, the spirit of doors; Cardea, that of hinges; Limentinus, that of the threshold, &c., which can scarcely be dignified by the name of gods, but are rather spirits, and amply warrant Chantepie de la Saussaye's remark that Roman religion was still steeped in animism.[3] The other class includes such gods as Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Diana, Venus, Hercules, &c. It is necessary to note, however, that the worship even of these gods can be proved to have been considerably Hellenised in historic times:[4] some of their ritual and all their mythology was borrowed from Greece, as we shall subsequently see. And when the loan-myths and loan-cults have been removed, the genuine Italian gods stand forth essentially and fundamentally different from those of Greece.[5] Here, too, we may note that if comparative mythologists adhere to their principle of not identifying the gods of different nations, unless their names can be shown by comparative philology to be identical, they must admit that Mars and Ares, Venus and Aphrodite, Diana and Artemis, Juno and Hera, and all the other pairs of deities which the ancients identified, are, with the sole exception of Jupiter and Zeus and of Vesta and Hestia, not of cognate but of diverse origin. In fine, the differences between Greek and Italian gods are fundamental and original: the resemblances can be shown to be due to borrowing in historic times.

      There is, however, one of the great Roman gods who was never identified with any Hellenic deity, Janus. Now, although Janus ranks with Jupiter and Mars in the Roman system as an indubitable god, yet in origin and function he is not to be distinguished from those inferior, animistic powers to whom the title of spirit is the highest that can be assigned. Janus is the spirit that resides in or presides over door-openings (ianus, ianua), just as Forculus has to do with doors (fores), Limentinus with the threshold (limen), and Cardea with the hinges (cardo). He is also the "spirit of opening,"[6] who was to be invoked at the commencement of every act. Plutarch's questions why he should be represented with two heads, and why the year should begin with the month named after him, January (R.

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