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I




Plutarch



The Romans Questions




Bibllotb^aue be Carabas

VOL. VII.



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OTitlj fssettations on Italian

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PREFACE.

On the whole, with the proper qualifications,
Plutarch's Romane Questions may fairly be said
to be the earliest formal treatise written on
the subject of folk-lore. The problems which
Plutarch proposes for solution are mainly such
as the modern science of folk-lore undertakes
to solve ; and though Plutarch was not the
first to propound them, he was the first to
make a collection and selection of them and
give them a place of their own in literature.
On the other hand, though Plutarch's questions
are in the spirit of modern scientific inquiry,
his answers or rather the answers which he
sets forth, for they are not always or usually
his own are conceived in a diff'erent strain.
They are all built on the assumption that the
customs which they are intended to explain
were consciously and deliberately instituted by
men who possessed at least as much culture



186105



vi PREFACE.

and wisdom as Plutarch himself, or the other
philosophers who busied themselves with this
branch of antiquities. This assumption, how-
ever, that the primitive Italians or the pro-
ethnic Aryans shared the same (erroneous)
scientific and philosophical views as the savants
of Plutarch's day, is an unverified and impro-
bable hypothesis. The Aryans were in the
Stone Age, and had advanced only to such
rudimentary agriculture as is possible for a
nomad people. If, therefore, we are to explain
their customs, we must keep within the narrow
circle which bounds the thought and imagina-
tion of other peoples in the same stage of
development. Plutarch, however, in effect asks
himself, "If I had instituted these customs,
what would my motives have been?" and in
reply to his own question he shows what very
learned reasons might have moved him ; and
also, quite unconsciously, what very amiable
feelings would in reality have governed him ;
for, if he ascribes to the authors of these
customs the learning of all the many books
which he had read, he also credits them with
a kindliness of character which belonged to
himself alone. Thus, to go no further than



PREFACE. vii

the first of the Romane Questions^ viz., What
is the reafon that new-ioedded wives are hidden
to touch fire and water'} Plutarch first gives
four high philosophical reasons, which he may-
have borrowed, but concludes with one which
we may be sure is his own : "Or laft of all
[is it] becaufe man and wife ought not to
forfake and abandon one another, but to take
part of all fortunes \ though they had no other
good in the world common between them, but
fire and water only ? "

That this, like the rest of Plutarch's reasons,
is fanciful, may not be denied, but would not
be worth mentioning, were it not that here
we have, implicit, the reason why no modern
translation could ever vie with Philemon
Holland's version of the Romane Questions. It
is not merely because Philemon's antiquated
English harmonises with Plutarch's antiquated
speculation, and by that harmony disposes the
reader's mind favourably towards it ; but in
Philemon's day, England, like the other coun-
tries of Western Europe, was discovering that
all that is worth knowing is in Greek. The
universal respect felt for Greek in those days,
even by schoolmasters (Holland was himself



viii PREFACE.

Head-master of Coventry Free School), is still
apparent to those who read this translation.
But things are now so changed that the English
language of to-day cannot provide a seemly
garb for Plutarch's ancient reasonings. To say
in modern EngUsh that " five is the odd number
most connected with marriage," is to expose
the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers to modern
ridicule. But when Philemon says, "Now
among al odde numbers it seemeth that Cinque
is most nuptial," even the irreverent modem
cannot fail to feel that Cinque was an emi-
nently respectable character, whose views were
strictly honourable and a bright example to
other odde numbers. Again, Philemon's in-
sertion of the words "it seemeth" makes for
reverence. The insertion is not apologetic ;
nor does it intimate that the translator hesitates
to subscribe to so strange a statement. Rather,
it summons the reader to give closer attention
to the words which are about to follow words
of wisdom such as is to be foimd nowhere else
but only in the fountain of all knowledge, Greek.
Insertions and amplifications are indeed charac-
teristic of Philemon as a translator. But, though
his style is florid, it is lucid ; his ampUfications



PREFACE,



IX



make the meaning clearer to the English reader,
and, as a rule, only state explicitly what is really
implied in the original. Sometimes {e.g., towards
the end of R. Q. 6) he does enlarge on the text
beyond all measure ; sometimes, again, defective
scholarship leads him to ascribe things to Plu-
tarch which Plutarch never said {e.g., in R. Q. 5,
ravra. r^o'ffov r/va, rolg *EX>.7jv/xo/'5 soixsv does not
mean " this may feeme in fome fort to have
beene derived from the Greeks"); and some-
times he is mistaken as to the meaning of a
word {e.g., hoxog in R. Q. 5). On the other
hand, where the text is corrupt, he sees and
says what the meaning really is; and Hearne's
verdict that Holland had "an admirable knack
in translating books" does not go beyond the
mark. Indeed, it does not do justice to Phile-
mon, for it hardly prepares us to learn that, in
the infancy of the study of Greek in England,
Philemon threw off, among other trifles, trans-
lations of all the Moralia of Plutarch, the whole
of Livy, the enormous Natural History of Pliny,
Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, the Cyropcedia
of Xenophon, and Camden's Britannia. Southey
is more just to the assiduous labours of a life of
study carried to the age of eighty-five, when he



X PREFACE.

calls Philemon "the best of the Hollands."
But the most discerning criticism of Holland,
as " translator generall in his age " (Fuller), is
contained in Owen's epigram on Holland's trans-
lation of the Natural History^ that he was both
plenior and planior than Plinius.

To judge from the Romane Questions^ Phile-
mon must have used as l^s text the edition of
1560-70, Venet., for he evidently avails him-
self of Xylander's emendations of the Aldine
editio princeps, 1509-19. One cannot, how-
ever, be quite certain on this point, for the title-
page of Holland's translation of the Moralia
runs : " The Philosophic, commonly called the
Morals, written by the learned philosopher
Plutarch of Chaeronea, translated out of Greek
into English, and conferred with Latin and
French." Now the Latin translation must
have been Xylander's; and the only edition
of the text used by Holland may have been
that of H. Stephens, with which Xylander's
Latin translation and notes were published.
The French with which Philemon conferred
was of course that of Jacques Amyot, who had
abeady translated Plutarch's Lives in 1559,
and followed up that translation with one of



PREFACE. xi

the Moralia in 1574. Philemon's translation
of the Morals appeared in 1603 ("revised and
corrected" in 1657).

The Morals in general and the Romane Ques-
tions in particular have received little attention
from commentators. The only notes I have
succeeded in getting hold of, besides those of
Xylander and Reiske (complete edition of Plu-
tarch, Lips., 1774-82), are some by Boxhorn (in
the fifth volume of the Thesaurus of Graevius,
1696), which includes one sensible remark
(quoted p. xxxii. below), and those by Wytten-
bach (Oxford, 182 1), which, if I had looked
at them before instead of after writing my
Introduction, would have provided me with a
good many classical references that, as it is, I
have had to put together myself.



INTRODUCTION.



I. The Subject of the "Eomane 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 dis-
cussed 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

xiii



xiv INTRODUCTION.

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, modem
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 famihar,
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



INTRODUCTION. xv

Aryans, having a mythology, were already poly-
theists : mucli more, therefore, must the Italians
have been polytheists from the beginning. I
am sorry to say that I cannot meet this diffi-
culty : I can only frankly warn the reader that
it exists. But in an Introduction which pro-
fesses 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,



xvi INTRODUCTION.

is to be found in the Vedas. Vritra, a three-
headed snake, steals cows from Indra, who dis-
covers 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 accord-
ance 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 neces-
sarily 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



INTRODUCTION. xvii

two peoples in a cliaracteristic manner. The
learned Koman, whose object was to explain the
origin of the customs, cults, institutions, &c., of
Eome, 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 Eome 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



xviii INTRODUCTION.

that, until borrowed from Hellas, polytheism
was unkno-vvn lq 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 ad-
mitted (see e.g. Mommsen's History of Rome^
i. 1 86 ff.f or Ihne, i. 119). Even so strong a
supporter of the theory of a Graeco-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 ^sculapius and Vulcan were built outside
Rome {Eomane 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 pomoe-
rium, reserved for the temples of indigenous
Roman gods. In the case of -^culapius we



INTRODUCTION. xix

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.* We do not
happen to have any similar historical record of
the introduction of Yulcan's worship, but the
name of the god, be it Cretan or Etruscan, is
foreign, f

Having eliminated these and other loan-gods,
we find that the genuine Italian deities which
remain fall into two classes. The one class con-
sists 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. J The other class includes

* Livy, X. 47, 7, Ep. 11; Val. Max., I. viii. 2 ; Strabo,
xii. p. 567 ; Ovid, F., i. 291 ; M., xv. 622 ; Oros, iii.
22; Lactant., Inst, II. vii. 13; Arnob., vii. 44; Augustin,
C. D., iii. 17 ; Aurel. Vict., De V. Ill, 25 ; Dion., v.
13; Pliny, i\r. ^., 29, 16.

t Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan
Peoples, p. 162.

+ Reiigionsgeschichte, ii. 203.



XX INTRODUCTION.

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 : * 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, t
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 philo-
logy 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.

* Meyer, Indogermanische My then, it p. 6 1 2.

t Marquardt, Edmische Staatsverwaltung^, iii. p. 2.



INTRODUCTION. xxi

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 (ianuSf ianua\ just as Forculus has
to do with doors (fores), Limentinus with the
threshold (Umen), and Cardea with the hinges
(car do). He is also the " spirit of opening," *
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. Q., 22 and 19), are thus
at once explained: "The double-head looking
both ways was connected with the gate that
opened both ways ;" and in January, "after the
rest of the middle of winter, the cycle of the
labours of the field began afresh." f

That the door or the threshold is the seat of

* Mommsen, History of Rome, i. 173.
t Ibid. ; cf. Roscher, Lexikon, s.v. lanus.



xxii INTRODUCTION.

a tutelary spirit or genius is a belief familiar
enough in folk-lore : the door must not be
banged,* nor wood chopped on the threshold,!
for fear of disturbing him. He is apt to dis-
appear, taking the luck of the house with him,
if a cat is maliciously buried under the door-
sill, t or if human hair is so buried. The im-
portance of the door as a possible entrance for
evil spirits, or exit for lucky ones, is manifest
in many customs, e.g.y nailing a horse-shoe on
the door or sticking a knife into the door, and
in such beliefs as that when a door opens
(apparently) of itself, a spirit is entering.

Whether the Italian spirit of the doorway,
who in origin is indistinguishable from the
similar though nameless spirits to be found else-
where, was capable by his own unaided efforts
of raising himself to the rank of a god, is matter
for speculation. What is clear is that he had
not the chance : the introduction of Greek poly-
theism into Italy promoted him without exertion
on his part.

* Rochholz, DetUscher Glaube, ii. 136.

t Wuttke, Deutscker Vdksaberglaube^, 57.

t Ibid., 177, 388.

ibid., 395 ; cf. Pliny, N. H., 28, 86.



INTRODUCTION. xxiii

As, thus far, I have assumed a distinction
between "gods" and "spirits," and have also
assumed that a belief in the latter may exist
without polytheism and precede it, it will be
well here to state explicitly the distinction.
And that I may not be suspected of drawing
the distinction so as to suit my own ends, I
shall here borrow from a standard work, Chan-
tepie de la Saussaye's ReligionsgescMchte (i. 90).
De la Saussaye notes five characteristics involved
in the conception of "gods." First, they are
related to one another as members of a family
or community, and as subject to one god, who is
either lord of all, or at any rate primus inter
pares. Second, with the growth of art, they
are represented plastically and are made in the
image of man. Third, as ethics advance, moral
benefits are associated with their worship.
Hence, in the fourth place, the gods are con-
ceived as personal, individual beings, ideally
good and beautiful. Finally, the human intellect
demands that the relations of the gods to one
another and to Nature should be co-ordinated
into a system, and so theogonies and cosmogonies
are invented.

Now, if these be the marks whereby gods are



xxiv INTRODUCTION.

distinguished from spirits, I submit that, before
the introduction of Greek gods and cults, the
Romans had not advanced as far as polytheism,
but were still in the purely animistic stage.
Here again, to avoid the temptation of inter-
preting the evidence unduly in favour of the
conclusion to which it seems to me to point, I
will confine myself to quotations. Ihne (Hist
of Borne, i. 1 1 8) says that to the Romans, before
the period of Hellenic influence, " the gods were
only mysterious spiritual beings, without human
forms, without human feelings and impulses,
without human virtues or weaknesses. . . .
Though the divine beings were conceived as
male or female, they did not join in marriage
or beget children. . . . No genuine Roman
legend tells of any race of nobles sprung from
gods." Again, "The original Roman worship
had no images of the gods or houses set apart
for them" (Mommsen, i. 183). "A simple
spear, even a rough stone, sufficed as a symbol "
(Ihne, 119). Roman religion had nothing to
do with morality : "it was designed for use in
practical life" (Ibid. 120). "The religion of
Rome had nothing of its own peculiar growth
even remotely parallel to the religion of Apollo



INTRODUCTION. xxv

investing earthly morality with its halo of glory"
(Mommsen, 172). Mommsen's observation that
"the hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly
foreign to the Eomans " (174) is explained by
the fact that a hero is a being of human origin
raised by good deeds to the rank of a god, and
the Eomans had no gods. Myths about the
love-adventures of the gods and theogonies were
unknown to early Kome.* An Italian cosmo-
gony has not yet been discovered, and even the
wide-spread belief in the union of Father Sky
and Mother Earth had not been evolved in
Italy.

In fine " the beings which the Eomans wor-
shipped were rather numina than personal gods."f
Even the spirits whom we can trace back under
definite names to the purely Italian period, such
as Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, Mars, are not individual,
personal beings. Each of these names is the
name of a class of spirits. "Each community
of course had its own Mars, and deemed him to
be the strongest and holiest of all " (Mommsen,
i. 175). Each household had its own Vesta.
There were many Jupiters, many Junos. In
England, in the same way, the name of Puck,

* Marquardt, iii. 6. t De la Saussaye, ii, 203.



xxvi INTRODUCTION.

who is a definite individual personality in one
stage of our fairy mythology, was originally a
class-name of the spirits whom, as Burton says
in his Anatomy y " we commonly call poukes."

I will conclude this section with quotations
from two distinguished authorities on Mythology,
who would both dissent from the views which
have been advanced above, but whose words
seem to me to bear unintentional testimony in
favour of those views. E. H. Meyer, in his
Indogermanisclie Mythen (ii. 612), says, "Roman
religion seldom displays more than the elementai'y
rudimentSy or rather let us say the last remnants
of mythology," and "whereas the cult of the
greater gods is known to us in a form greatly
affected by Hellenism, . . . the local gods
usually scarcely rise above the rank of spirits
{sich meistens kaum- iiber daemonischen Rang
erhehen)." Preller, in his Romische Mythologie
(i. 48), says, " The Romans' belief in gods would