The Historians' History of the World 05

The deified Romulus was called Quirinus. As Romulus was the eponymous hero of the Palatine Romans, so Quirinus was the chief and most highly venerated, and perhaps the eponymous divinity of the Quiritian Sabines; hence the identification. It is a figure of the amalgamation of the two nations into one, a symbol of their complete unity in constitution and religion. The wife of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, was called Hora or Horta. She was presumably a female divinity united in the religion of the Sabines to Quirinus. The festival of the people’s flight (Poplifugia) or the Caprotinæ nones, which tradition has confused with the death of Romulus, is an ancient feast of purification; for, according to the story, Romulus disappeared during a feast of purification which he had ordained on that day. From other customs it is evident that the festival was chiefly a festival of female fecundity, to which purification from every pollution and sin was held to be conducive, by averting all pernicious influences, by propitiating the fructifying powers, and in short by purification or lustration. The festival of the Caprotinæ nones was very like the Lupercalian festival in purpose and significance. The particular resemblance between them was the part played by the goat, the symbol of animal fecundity. At the Lupercalia a goat was sacrificed, and the luperci (the priests who officiated) ran through the streets, clothed in goatskins, lashing the women with whips made with the skins of the victims. There is a connection with the same festival in the name of the Caprotinæ nones. The Goats’ Pool on the Field of Mars was the place where it was held, the sacrifice was offered under a pine tree (caprificus), the milk of the tree was used, and under the shade of the pine trees the women and maidens were solemnly regaled.

Moreover, the symbolical people’s flight which figures in the festival customs of the Caprotinæ nones is suggestive of a similar rite in the Lupercalia—i.e., the running away (discurrere) of the luperci after the offering of the sacrifice. But the ancients say nothing definite concerning this symbolical flight of the people; they only explained it as due either to the sudden and fearful disappearance of Romulus, or to panic at the threatened attack of some neighbouring cities on Rome when she was exhausted and feeble from the Gallic reverse, or after a defeat at the hands of the Etruscans. A more exact interpretation is impossible. But if we are forced to assign the ceremony to the Caprotinan festival, it can only have been a ceremony of lustration. Probably, when the sin and impurity of the people had been symbolically laid upon a vicarious victim (like a sacrificial animal) the flight of the people symbolised their freedom and deliverance from sin. It had probably the same meaning as the flight of the rex sacrificulus from the Comitium. In the Greek religion we find the same ceremony of symbolical flight and there it is certainly a rite of lustration.

We now arrive at the question of how tradition came to celebrate the disappearance of Romulus at this festival of the Poplifugia or the Caprotinæ nones. What connection had the name or person of Romulus with this feast? Unfortunately the darkness which envelops the earliest religion of the Romans excludes all light on the question. One can only say that the same reason which conduced to the association of Romulus with the Lupercalian festival lay at the root of his connection with the kindred ceremony in the festival of the Caprotina.d

FOOTNOTES

[4] [Cf. page 51, note.]

[5] “Pagus,” old word for “canton.”

Etruscan Jewelry

(In the British Museum)

Numa Pompilius chosen King

(From a drawing by Mirys)

CHAPTER III. LEGENDARY HISTORY OF THE KINGS

NUMA POMPILIUS

Egeria! sweet creature of some heart

Which found no mortal resting-place so fair

As thine ideal breast; whate’er thou art

Or wert,—a young Aurora of the air,

The nympholepsy of some fond despair;

Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth,

Who found a more than common votary there

Too much adoring; whatsoe’er thy birth,

Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

—Byron. Childe Harold.

[ca. 716-673 B.C.]

When Romulus was taken from the earth, there was no one found to reign in his place. The senators would choose no king, but they divided themselves into tens; and every ten was to have the power of king for five days, one after the other. So a year passed away, and the people murmured, and said that there must be a king chosen.

Now the Romans and the Sabines each wished that the king should be one of them; but at last it was agreed that the king should be a Sabine, but that the Romans should choose him. So they chose Numa Pompilius; for all men said that he was a just man, and wise, and holy.