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IN
THE FIRST place, then, it would seem that the Roman king personated no
less a deity than Jupiter himself. For down to imperial times victorious
generals celebrating a triumph, and magistrates presiding at the games
in the Circus, wore the costume of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the
occasion from his great temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with
a high degree of probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing
they copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings. They
rode a chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the city, where
every one else went on foot: they wore purple robes embroidered or spangled
with gold: in the right hand they bore a branch of laurel, and in the
left hand an ivory sceptre topped with an eagle: a wreath of laurel crowned
their brows: their face was reddened with vermilion; and over their head
a slave held a heavy crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of
oak leaves. In this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes
out above all in the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened
face. For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree,
and the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the Capitol
was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals; indeed, so important
was it deemed to keep the divine features properly rouged that one of
the first duties of the censors was to contract for having this done.
As the triumphal procession always ended in the temple of Jupiter on the
Capitol, it was peculiarly appropriate that the head of the victor should
be graced by a crown of oak leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated
to Jupiter, but the Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been
built by Romulus beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which
the king attached the spoils won by him from the enemy’s general
in battle. We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to Capitoline
Jupiter; a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god’s
special emblem. 1
According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome was founded
by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on the slope of the Alban
hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna. Hence if the Roman kings
claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter, the god of the
sky, of the thunder, and of the oak, it is natural to suppose that the
kings of Alba, from whom the founder of Rome traced his descent, may have
set up the same claim before them. Now the Alban dynasty bore the name
of Silvii or Wood, and it can hardly be without significance that in the
vision of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in the underworld,
Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet, should represent all the line
of Silvii as crowned with oak. A chaplet of oak leaves would thus seem
to have been part of the insignia of the old kings of Alba Longa as of
their successors the kings of Rome; in both cases it marked the monarch
as the human representative of the oak-god. The Roman annals record that
one of the kings of Alba, Romulus, Remulus, or Amulius Silvius by name,
set up for being a god in his own person, the equal or superior of Jupiter.
To support his pretensions and overawe his subjects, he constructed machines
whereby he mimicked the clap of thunder and the flash of lightning. Diodorus
relates that in the season of fruitage, when thunder is loud and frequent,
the king commanded his soldiers to drown the roar of heaven’s artillery
by clashing their swords against their shields. But he paid the penalty
of his impiety, for he perished, he and his house, struck by a thunderbolt
in the midst of a dreadful storm. Swollen by the rain, the Alban lake
rose in flood and drowned his palace. But still, says an ancient historian,
when the water is low and the surface unruffled by a breeze, you may see
the ruins of the palace at the bottom of the clear lake. Taken along with
the similar story of Salmoneus, king of Elis, this legend points to a
real custom observed by the early kings of Greece and Italy, who, like
their fellows in Africa down to modern times, may have been expected to
produce rain and thunder for the good of the crops. The priestly king
Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the
sky. Mock thunder, we know, has been made by various peoples as a rain-charm
in modern times; why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity?
2
Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the oak
by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have copied him in
his character of a weather-god by pretending to make thunder and lightning.
And if they did so, it is probable that, like Jupiter in heaven and many
kings on earth, they also acted as public rain-makers, wringing showers
from the dark sky by their enchantments whenever the parched earth cried
out for the refreshing moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened
by means of a sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed part
of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the clouds
the flashing lightning and the dripping rain. And who so well fitted to
perform the ceremony as the king, the living representative of the sky-god?
3
If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors the kings
of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great Latian Jupiter,
who had his seat above the city on the summit of the Alban Mountain. Latinus,
the legendary ancestor of the dynasty, was said to have been changed into
Latian Jupiter after vanishing from the world in the mysterious fashion
characteristic of the old Latin kings. The sanctuary of the god on the
top of the mountain was the religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba
was its political capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient
rival. Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever erected
to Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and thunder he
appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in the open air.
The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose the old garden of
the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part of the sacred precinct
which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, marked out for the solemn
annual assembly of the Latin League. The god’s oldest sanctuary
on this airy mountain-top was a grove; and bearing in mind not merely
the special consecration of the oak to Jupiter, but also the traditional
oak crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter
at Rome, we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks. We know
that in antiquity Mount Algidus, an outlying group of the Alban hills,
was covered with dark forests of oak; and among the tribes who belonged
to the Latin League in the earliest days, and were entitled to share the
flesh of the white bull sacrificed on the Alban Mount, there was one whose
members styled themselves the Men of the Oak, doubtless on account of
the woods among which they dwelt. 4
But we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country as covered in
historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks. Theophrastus has left
us a description of the woods of Latium as they were in the fourth century
before Christ. He says: “The land of the Latins is all moist. The
plains produce laurels, myrtles, and wonderful beeches; for they fell
trees of such a size that a single stem suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian
ship. Pines and firs grow in the mountains. What they call the land of
Circe is a lofty headland thickly wooded with oak, myrtle, and luxuriant
laurels. The natives say that Circe dwelt there, and they show the grave
of Elpenor, from which grow myrtles such as wreaths are made of, whereas
the other myrtle-trees are tall.” Thus the prospect from the top
of the Alban Mount in the early days of Rome must have been very different
in some respects from what it is to-day. The purple Apennines, indeed,
in their eternal calm on the one hand, and the shining Mediterranean in
its eternal unrest on the other, no doubt looked then much as they look
now, whether bathed in sunshine, or chequered by the fleeting shadows
of clouds; but instead of the desolate brown expanse of the fever-stricken
Campagna, spanned by its long lines of ruined aqueducts, like the broken
arches of the bridge in the vision of Mirza, the eye must have ranged
over woodlands that stretched away, mile after mile, on all sides, till
their varied hues of green or autumnal scarlet and gold melted insensibly
into the blue of the distant mountains and sea. 5
But Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain. He had
his consort with him, the goddess Juno, who was worshipped here under
the same title, Moneta, as on the Capitol at Rome. As the oak crown was
sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol, so we may suppose it was on
the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline worship was derived. Thus the
oak-god would have his oak-goddess in the sacred oak grove. So at Dodona
the oak-god Zeus was coupled with Dione, whose very name is only a dialectically
different form of Juno; and so on the top of Mount Cithaeron, as we have
seen, he appears to have been periodically wedded to an oaken image of
Hera. It is probable, though it cannot be positively proved, that the
sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno was annually celebrated by all the
peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after the goddess,
the midsummer month of June. 6
If at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred marriage of
Jupiter and Juno, as the Greeks commonly celebrated the corresponding
marriage of Zeus and Hera, we may suppose that under the Republic the
ceremony was either performed over images of the divine pair or acted
by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flaminica. For the Flamen Dialis
was the priest of Jove; indeed, ancient and modern writers have regarded
him, with much probability, as a living image of Jupiter, a human embodiment
of the sky-god. In earlier times the Roman king, as representative of
Jupiter, would naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom at the
sacred marriage, while his queen would figure as the heavenly bride, just
as in Egypt the king and queen masqueraded in the character of deities,
and as at Athens the queen annually wedded the vine-god Dionysus. That
the Roman king and queen should act the parts of Jupiter and Juno would
seem all the more natural because these deities themselves bore the title
of King and Queen. 7
Whether that was so or not, the legend of Numa and Egeria appears to embody
a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king himself played the part
of the divine bridegroom; and as we have seen reason to suppose that the
Roman kings personated the oak-god, while Egeria is expressly said to
have been an oak-nymph, the story of their union in the sacred grove raises
a presumption that at Rome in the regal period a ceremony was periodically
performed exactly analogous to that which was annually celebrated at Athens
down to the time of Aristotle. The marriage of the King of Rome to the
oak-goddess, like the wedding of the vine-god to the Queen of Athens,
must have been intended to quicken the growth of vegetation by homoeopathic
magic. Of the two forms of the rite we can hardly doubt that the Roman
was the older, and that long before the northern invaders met with the
vine on the shores of the Mediterranean their forefathers had married
the tree-god to the tree-goddess in the vast oak forests of Central and
Northern Europe. In the England of our day the forests have mostly disappeared,
yet still on many a village green and in many a country lane a faded image
of the sacred marriage lingers in the rustic pageantry of May Day.
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