Plutarch's Romane Questions. Plutarch
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of sowing, of manuring, &c., and he seems to have been even of inferior dignity to the spirit of doorways.[18] The earth, on the other hand, does not seem to have been conceived of as a spirit even, much less as a goddess; but, if worshipped at all, was worshipped as a fetich.[19] Hence, the absence from Italy of any trace of the myth of the origin of all living creatures from a union between the earth and the sky.
Indeed, if by a myth we mean a tale told about gods or heroes, there are no Italian myths.[20] Myths attached to Greek loan-gods were borrowed with the gods from Greece. Myths in which Italian gods figure were borrowed or invented when the Italian gods were identified with Greek gods. Thus the Golden Age myth, for instance, can be referred to the time (A.U.C. 257) when Saturnus was identified with Kronos.[21] And of course, all the myths in which Æneas appears, and the whole mythical connection between Rome and Greece or Troy, are late.[22] Evander,[23] again, who figures in various passages of the Romane Questions, owes his existence wholly and solely to the attempt to connect Rome with Greece.
If, on the other hand, under the head of myth we include "the popular explanation of observed facts," then early Roman history, as Ihne says (i. 17), "is really nothing more than a string of tales, in which an attempt is made to explain old names, religious ceremonies and monuments, political institutions and antiquities, and to account for their origin." Some examples of this may be drawn from the Romane Questions. Marriage by capture has left traces behind it in the wedding customs of many countries, and the meaning of these survivals is usually wholly forgotten. But the historic consciousness of the Romans was so far alive to the actual facts of the case that the mock capture was explained as the commemoration of an actual historical rape—the Rape of the Sabines. Thus were explained the lifting of the bride over the threshold (Q. R. 19), the use of a javelin point to divide the bride's hair (Ibid. 87), the hymeneal cry Talassio (Ibid. 31), and the fact that maids might not (though widows might) marry on festival days (Ibid. 105). The first of these customs is probably a survival from marriage by capture, and the last is indirectly connected with it. In Rome,[24] as in many other places,[25] the lamentations of the bride who was actually captured survived in the formal, extravagant lamentations of the bride who, in quieter times, was more peacefully won; and these cries would have been of bad omen on a day dedicated to the worship of the gods. Lamentation seems not to have been required of widows. The use of an iron javelin point is probably due to the dangers which, in the opinion of primitive man, attend on those about to marry, and require to be averted by the use of iron,[26] from the head[27] especially. The origin of the cry Talassio is beyond recovery.[28]
But though the chief branch of Italian folk-tales consisted of popular explanations of observed facts, we can detect traces of those other folk-tales which from the beginning must have been designed simply and solely to gratify man's inherent desire for tales of adventure and the marvellous. Here it must suffice to point to two of the Romane Questions. In the fourth question we have a tale told of successful trickery on the part of Servius Tullius, which may well have formed part of some story of a Master Thief; and in Romane Questions 36, the nightly visits of Fortuna through the window to her lover, Servius Tullius, at once remind us of the "soul-maidens" and "swan-maidens," who visit, and eventually desert, their human lover through the window or the keyhole[29]—the orthodox means of entrance and exit for spirits from the time of Homer at least.
IV. The Soul.
The customs and beliefs, the superstitious practices and supernatural beings, of modern European folk-lore are sometimes explained as the wrecks and remnants of the Pagan polytheism which preceded Christianity. And if the Aryan peoples were from the very beginning polytheists; if the Hellenes and the Hindoos, the Teutons and the Scandinavians, brought their myths and their cults with them from the original Aryan home, then this explanation seems more reasonable than that which proceeds on a mere conjecture, a pure assumption that the Aryan religion was animistic ere it was polytheistic; for then we are obliged to relegate Aryan animism almost to the æon "of chaos and eternal night,"—at any rate, to an abysm of time which is such that neither linguistic palæontology nor any other science has dared
"to venture down
The dark descent and up to reascend."
But if the proposition submitted in the previous sections be sound, if in early but still historic times Italian religion was still in a stage anterior to polytheism, then Aryan animism is no longer a mere assumption, and need no longer be thrust back into pro-ethnic times. Early Italian customs and beliefs will not be the débris of a previous polytheism, and it will therefore be unreasonable to explain their counterparts in modern folk-lore as mutilated myths or as the cult of gods degraded but worshipped still.
Plutarch, in the fifth of his Romane Questions (p. 8 below), propounds an interesting problem: Why are they who have beene falsly reported dead in a strange countrey, although they returne home alive, not received nor suffred to enter directly at the dores, but forced to climbe up to the tiles of the house, and so to get down from the roufe into the house? This remarkable custom continued to be practised long after its origin and object had been forgotten; for Plutarch relates a tale which is obviously a popular explanation, invented to account for a practice the rationale of which had become unintelligible.[30] Hard, however, as Plutarch's question appears at first sight, it may by the aid of modern folk-lore and savage custom be explained. We have to note, in the first place, that the mode of entry prescribed for the returned traveller is not spontaneously adopted by him; and presumably, therefore, is not prescribed in his interest: it is enforced by his relatives, and probably for their own protection. In the next place, though the traveller himself knows, of course, that he has not returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns, his relatives have no such assurance: it may be, indeed, that he did not die whilst away, as they were informed or led to believe; but, on the other hand, he may be "the ghost of their dear friend dead," seeking to obtain an entrance into his old home. The reasonable course for them to pursue, therefore, is to treat him as though he were a ghost: if he is no ghost, it will do him no harm; if he is, they will have protected themselves.
Thus far our explanation is hypothetical: to verify the hypothesis it is necessary to show that the dead are or were as a matter of fact treated as the Roman custom prescribes that the soi disant living man shall be treated. That the spirits of the dead are considered unwelcome visitors both in modern folk-lore and by savage man, has been insisted on most recently by Mr. G. L. Gomme.[31] I will, therefore, only add one or two instances of the precautions taken to prevent the return of the deceased to his home.[32] The first thing is to get the soul out of the house; this may be effected by sweeping out the house and by flapping dusters about, care being taken to shake and turn upside down all vessels, meal-boxes, &c., in which the soul might take refuge. Then the coffin must be carried foot foremost through the door; for if the corpse's face be turned to the house, the ghost can return. In Siam they run the corpse three times round the house, apparently on the same principle as, in the game of blind-man's buff, the blind-man is spun round in order to make him lose his bearings. In Bohemia they turn the coffin about cross-wise, outside the house-door, to prevent the dead man from coming back.
More pertinent for our present purpose are the precautions taken to prevent the dead from obtaining access to the house through the door. The safest course is to carry the corpse out, not through the door, for that gives the dead man the right of way which it is sought to bar, but through some opening which is specially made for the purpose and can be permanently closed. Thus the Hottentots make a breach through the wall for the purpose. The ancient Norsemen did the same.[33] The Teutons, in pre-Christian times, dug a hole under the threshold and pulled the corpse through with a rope. In Christian times they only treated the bodies of criminals and suicides in this way, though in the thirteenth century Brother Berthhold of Regensburg recommended it in the case of heretics and usurers.
When circumstances make it difficult or impossible to construct a special exit of this kind for the corpse, then some other means is found to avoid carrying the corpse through the door. The Eskimo take the body through a window; and a window was in 1858 used in Sonneberg in the case of a hanged man; while even