Roman Religion

Ritual.

In such a religion exactness of ritual must play a large part—so large, indeed, that many modern critics have been misled into regarding the Roman religion as a mere network of formalities without any background of genuine religious feeling. This formalism shows itself in many ways. It was necessary in the first place to make quite certain that the right deity was being addressed : hence it was well to invoke all the spirits who might be concerned, and even to add a general formula to cover omis sions. Place, again, was an essential element even in the concep tion of the numen, and was therefore all-important in ritual. So, too, was the character of the offering: male victims must be sacri ficed to male deities; female victims to goddesses; white animals were the due of the di superi, the gods of the upper world, black animals of the gods below ; the more rustic numina, such as Pales (q.v.), should be given milk and millet cakes rather than a blood offering. All-important, too, was the order of ceremonial and the formula of prayer: a mistake or omission or an unpropitious interruption might vitiate the whole ritual, and though such mis fortunes might occasionally be expiated by the additional offering of a piaculum, in more serious cases the whole ceremony had to be recommenced from the beginning.

Household Worship.—In the original agricultural commu nity, the unit both from the legal and religious point of view was not the individual but the household. The household was thus at once the logical starting-point of religious cult, and throughout Roman history the centre of its most real and vital activity. The head of the house (paterfamilias) was the natural priest and had control of the domestic worship: he was assisted by his sons as acolytes (camilli) and deputed certain portions of the ritual to his wife and daughters and even to his bailiff (vilicus) and his bailiff's wife. The worship was offered to the spirits indwelling in the sacred places of the round hut in which the family lived. Janus, the god of the door, came first in the prayer-formulae, though unfortunately we know but little of his worship in the household, except that it was the concern of the men. To the women was committed the cult of the "blazing hearth," Vesta, the natural centre of the family life, and it is noticeable that even Ovid (Fast., vi. 291-92) describes Vesta as "nought but the living flame." The Penates (q.v.) were the numina of the store-cup board, at first vague and animistic, but later on, as the dens-notion was developed, individualized by selection from the other divini ties of household or state religion.

Lar and Genius.

To these numina of the sacred places must be added two other important conceptions, that of the lar famili aris and the genius. The lar familiaris has sometimes been regarded as the embodiment of all the family dead and his cult as a consummation of ancestor-worship, but a more probable explanation regards him as one of the lares (q.v. ; numina of the fields worshipped at the compita, the places where properties marched) who had special charge of the house or possibly of the household servants (familia); for it is significant that his worship was committed to the charge of the vilica. The genius was origi

nally the "spirit of developed manhood," the numen which is at tached to every man and represented the sum total of his powers and faculties as the inn° does of the woman ; each individual wor shipped his own genius on his birthday, but the household-cult was concerned with the genius of the paterfamilias. In the ordi nary religious life of the family there was a more direct connection with morality and a truer religious sense than in any other part of the Roman cult. The family meal was sanctified by the offer ing of a portion of the food to the household numina: the chief events in the individual life, birth, infancy, puberty, marriage, were all marked by religious ceremonial in some cases of a distinc tively primitive character. The dead, too, though it is doubtful whether in early times they were actually worshipped, at any rate had a religious commemoration as in some sense members still of the family.

From the life of the household we may pass to the outdoor occupations of the fields, where the early Roman settler met with his neighbours to celebrate in religious ceremonies the various stages of the agricultural year. Here we have a series of celebra tions representing the occupations of the successive seasons, ad dressed sometimes to numina who developed later on into the great gods of the State, such as Jupiter, Mars or Ceres, sometimes to vaguer divinities who remained always indefinite and rustic in character, such as Pales and Consus. Sometimes again, as in the Lupercalia (q.v.) the attribution was so indefinite that it is hard to discover who was the special deity concerned; at other fes tivals, such as those of the Robigalia and the Meditrinalia, the worship seems at first to have been addressed generally to any interested numina and only later to have developed a specific deity of its own. Roughly we may distinguish three main divisions of the calendar year, the festivals of spring, of the harvest and of winter. (I) In the spring (it must be remembered that the old Roman calendar began the year with March) we have ceremonials of anticipation and prayer for the crops to come : prominent among them were the Fordicidia, with its symbolic slaughter of pregnant cows, addressed to Tellus, the Cerealia, a prayer-service to Ceres for the corn-crop, and the most important of the rustic celebrations of lustration and propitiation, the Parilia, the festival of Pales. To these must be added the Ambarvalia (q.v.), the lustration of the fields, a movable feast (and therefore not found in the calendars) addressed at first to Mars in his agri cultural character (see MARS). (2) Of the harvest festivals the most significant were the twin celebrations on Aug. 21 and 25 to the divinity-pair Consus and Ops, who were both concerned with the storing of the year's produce, and two vintage festivals, the Vinalia Rustica and the Meditrinalia, connected with Jupiter. (3) The winter festivals were less homogeneous in character, but we may distinguish among them certain undoubtedly agricultural celebrations, the Saturnalia (connected with the sowing of the next year's crop), and a curious repetition of the harvest festivals to Consus and Ops.