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object:1.13 - The Kings of Rome and Alba
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XIII. The Kings of Rome and Alba



1. Numa and Egeria

FROM THE FOREGOING survey of custom and legend we may infer that the
sacred marriage of the powers both of vegetation and of water has
been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the
fertility of the earth, on which the life of animals and men
ultimately depends, and that in such rites the part of the divine
bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or woman. The
evidence may, therefore, lend some countenance to the conjecture
that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers of vegetation and
of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods,
tumbling cascades, and glassy lake, a marriage like that of our King
and Queen of May was annually celebrated between the mortal King of
the Wood and the immortal Queen of the Wood, Diana. In this
connexion an important figure in the grove was the water-nymph
Egeria, who was worshipped by pregnant women because she, like
Diana, could grant them an easy delivery. From this it seems fairly
safe to conclude that, like many other springs, the water of Egeria
was credited with a power of facilitating conception as well as
delivery. The votive offerings found on the spot, which clearly
refer to the begetting of children, may possibly have been dedicated
to Egeria rather than to Diana, or perhaps we should rather say that
the water-nymph Egeria is only another form of the great
nature-goddess Diana herself, the mistress of sounding rivers as
well as of umbrageous woods, who had her home by the lake and her
mirror in its calm waters, and whose Greek counterpart Artemis loved
to haunt meres and springs. The identification of Egeria with Diana
is confirmed by a statement of Plutarch that Egeria was one of the
oak-nymphs whom the Romans believed to preside over every green
oak-grove; for, while Diana was a goddess of the woodlands in
general, she appears to have been intimately associated with oaks in
particular, especially at her sacred grove of Nemi. Perhaps, then,
Egeria was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a
sacred oak. Such a spring is said to have gushed from the foot of
the great oak at Dodona, and from its murmurous flow the priestess
drew oracles. Among the Greeks a draught of water from certain
sacred springs or wells was supposed to confer prophetic powers.
This would explain the more than mortal wisdom with which, according
to tradition, Egeria inspired her royal husband or lover Numa. When
we remember how very often in early society the king is held
responsible for the fall of rain and the fruitfulness of the earth,
it seems hardly rash to conjecture that in the legend of the
nuptials of Numa and Egeria we have a reminiscence of a sacred
marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a
goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to
discharge his divine or magical functions. In such a rite the part
of the goddess might be played either by an image or a woman, and if
by a woman, probably by the Queen. If there is any truth in this
conjecture, we may suppose that the King and Queen of Rome
masqueraded as god and goddess at their marriage, exactly as the
King and Queen of Egypt appear to have done. The legend of Numa and
Egeria points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene
of the nuptial union, which, like the marriage of the King and Queen
of May, or of the vine-god and the Queen of Athens, may have been
annually celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility not only of
the earth but of man and beast. Now, according to some accounts, the
scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi,
and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in
that same grove the King of the Wood was wedded to Diana. The
convergence of the two distinct lines of enquiry suggests that the
legendary union of the Roman king with Egeria may have been a
reflection or duplicate of the union of the King of the Wood with
Egeria or her double Diana. This does not imply that the Roman kings
ever served as Kings of the Wood in the Arician grove, but only that
they may originally have been invested with a sacred character of
the same general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To
be more explicit, it is possible that they reigned, not by right of
birth, but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives
or embodiments of a god, and that as such they mated with a goddess,
and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge their
divine functions by engaging in a severe bodily struggle, which may
often have proved fatal to them, leaving the crown to their
victorious adversary. Our knowledge of the Roman kingship is far too
scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with
confidence; but at least there are some scattered hints or
indications of a similarity in all these respects between the
priests of Nemi and the kings of Rome, or perhaps rather between
their remote predecessors in the dark ages which preceded the dawn
of legend.



2. The King as Jupiter

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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