The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic. W. Warde Fowler
of the plebeian aediles, and was to them what the temple of Saturnus was to the quaestors[240]. Its position was in the plebeian quarter, and at the foot of the Aventine, which in B.C. 456 is said to have become the property of the plebs[241].
Now it can hardly be doubted that the choice of Ceres (with her fellow deities of the trias), as the goddess whose temple should serve as a centre for the plebeian community, had some definite meaning. That meaning must be found in the traditions of famine and distress which we read of as immediately following the expulsion of Tarquinius. These traditions have often been put aside as untrustworthy[242], and may indeed be so in regard to details; but there is some reason for thinking them to have had a foundation of fact, if we can but accept the other tradition of the foundation of the temple and its connexion with the plebs. It is likely enough that under Tarquinius the population was increased by ‘outsiders’ employed on his great buildings. Under pressure from the attack of enemies, and from a sudden aristocratic reaction, this population, we may guess, was thrown out of work, deprived of a raison d’être, and starved[243]; finally rescuing itself by a secession, which resulted in the institution of its officers, tribunes and aediles, the latter of whom some to have been charged with the duty of looking after the corn-supply[244].
How the corn-supply was cared for we cannot tell for certain; but here again is a tradition which fits in curiously with what we know of the temple and its worship, though it has been rejected by the superfluous ingenuity of modern German criticism. Livy tells us that in B.C. 492, the year after the dedication of the temple, corn was brought from Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily to relieve a famine[245]. We are not obliged to believe in the purchase of corn at Syracuse at so early a date, though it is not impossible; but if we remember that the decorations and ritual of the temple were Greek beyond doubt, we get a singular confirmation of the tradition in outline which has not been sufficiently noticed. If it was founded in 493, placed under plebeian officers, and closely connected with the plebs; if its rites and decorations were Greek from the beginning; we cannot afford to discard a tradition telling us of a commercial connexion with Greek cities, the object of which was to relieve a starving plebeian population.
And surely there is nothing strange in the supposition that Greek influence gained ground, not so much with the patricians who had their own outfit of religious armour, but with the plebs who had no share in the sacra of their betters, and with the Etruscan dynasty which favoured the plebs[246]. We may hesitate to assent to Mommsen’s curious assertion that the merchants of that day were none other than the great patrician landholders[247]; we may rather be disposed to conjecture that it was the more powerful plebeians, incapable of holding large areas of public land, who turned their attention to commerce, and came in contact with the Greeks of Italy and Sicily. The position of the plebeian quarter along the Tiber bank, and near the spot where the quays of Rome have always been, may possibly point in the same direction[248].
To return to the Cerealia of April 19. We have still to notice a relic of apparently genuine Italian antiquity which survived in it down to Ovid’s time, and may be taken as evidence that there was a real Roman substratum on which the later Greek ritual was superimposed.
Every one who reads Ovid’s account of the Cerealia will be struck by his statement that on the 19th it was the practice to fasten burning brands to the tails of foxes and set them loose to run in the Circus Maximus[249]:
Cur igitur missae vinctis ardentia taedis
Terga ferant volpes, causa docenda mihi est.
He tells a charming story to explain the custom, learnt from an old man of Carseoli, an Aequian town, where he was seeking information while writing the Fasti. A boy of twelve years’ old caught a vixen fox which had done damage to the farm, and tied it up in straw and hay. This he set on fire, but the fox escaped and burnt the crops. Hence a law at Carseoli forbidding—something about foxes, which the corruption of the MSS. has obscured for us[250]. Then he concludes:
Utque luat poenas gens haec, Cerialibus ardet;
Quoque modo segetes perdidit, ipsa perit.
We are, of course, reminded of Samson burning the corn of the Philistines[251]; and it is probable that the story in each case is a myth explanatory of some old practice like the one Ovid describes at Rome. But what the practice meant it is not very easy to see. Preller has his explanation ready[252]; it was a ‘sinnbildliche Erinnerung’ of the robigo (i.e. ‘red fox’), which was to be feared and guarded against at this time of year. Mannhardt thinks rather of the corn-foxes or corn-spirits of France and Germany, of which he gives many instances[253]. If the foxes were corn spirits, one does not quite see why they should have brands fastened to their tails[254]. No exactly parallel practice seems to be forthcoming, and the fox does not appear elsewhere in ancient Italian or Greek folk-tales, as far as I can discover. All that can be said is that the fox’s tail seems to have been an object of interest, and possibly to have had some fertilizing power[255], and some curious relation to ears of corn. Prof. Gubernatis believes this tail to have been a phallic symbol[256]. We need not accept his explanation, but we may be grateful to him for a modern Italian folk-tale, from the region of Leghorn and the Maremma, in which a fox is frightened away by chickens which carry each in its beak an ear of millet; the fox is told that these ears are all foxes’ tails, and runs for it.
Here we must leave this puzzle[257]; but whoever cares to read Ovid’s lines about his journey towards his native Pelignian country, his turning into the familiar lodging—
Hospitis antiqui solitas intravimus aedes,
and the tales he heard there—among them that of the fox—will find them better worth reading than the greater part of the Fasti.
xi Kal. Mai. (Apr. 21). NP.[258]
PAR[ILIA]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN.)
ROMA COND[ITA] FERIAE CORONATIS OM[NIBUS]. (CAER.)
N[ATALIS] URBIS. CIRCENSES MISSUS XXIV. (PHILOC.)
[A note in Praen. is hopelessly mutilated, with the exception of the words IGNES and PRINCIPIO AN[NI PASTORICII[259]?]]
The Parilia[260], at once one of the oldest and best attested festivals of the whole year, is at the same time the one whose features have been most clearly explained by the investigations of parallels among other races.
The first point to notice is that the festival was both public and private, urban and rustic[261]. Ovid clearly distinguishes the two; lines 721–734 deal with the urban festival, 735–782 with the rustic. The explanations which follow deal with both. Pales, the deity (apparently both masculine and feminine[262]) whose name the festival bears, was, like Faunus, a common deity of Italian pasture land. A Palatium was said by Varro to have been named after Pales at Reate, in the heart of the Sabine hill-country[263]; and though this may not go for much, the character of the Parilia, and the fact that Pales is called rusticola, pastoricia, silvicola, &c., are sufficient to show the original non-urban character of the deity. He (or she) was a shepherd’s deity of the simplest kind, and survived in Rome as little more than a name[264] from the oldest times, when the earliest invaders drove their cattle through the Sabine mountains. Here, then, we seem to have a clear example of a rite which was originally a rustic one, and survived as such, while at the same time one local form of it was kept up in the great city, and had become entangled with legend and probably altered in some points of ritual. We will take the rustic form first.
Here we may distinguish in Ovid’s account[265] the following ritualistic acts.
1. The sheep-fold[266] was decked with green boughs and a great wreath was hung on the gate:
Frondibus et fixis decorentur ovilia ramis,
Et