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object:1.14 - The Succesion to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



XIV. The Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium

IN REGARD to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited
by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the foregoing
discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented
and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the sky, the
thunder, and the oak, and in that character made rain, thunder, and
lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more kings of the
weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only mimicked
the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity,
but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been
merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods,
of waters, and of child-birth. All these conclusions, which we have
reached mainly by a consideration of the Roman evidence, may with
great probability be applied to the other Latin communities. They
too probably had of old their divine or priestly kings, who
transmitted their religious functions, without their civil powers,
to their successors the Kings of the Sacred Rites.

But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the
kingdom among the old Latin tribes? According to tradition, there
were in all eight kings of Rome, and with regard to the five last of
them, at all events, we can hardly doubt that they actually sat on
the throne, and that the traditional history of their reigns is, in
its main outlines, correct. Now it is very remarkable that though
the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been descended from
the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented as
hereditary in the male line, not one of the Roman kings was
immediately succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left
sons or grandsons behind them. On the other hand, one of them was
descended from a former king through his mother, not through his
father, and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the elder Tarquin,
and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their sons-in-law, who were
all either foreigners or of foreign descent. This suggests that the
right to the kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was
actually exercised by foreigners who married the royal princesses.
To put it in technical language, the succession to the kingship at
Rome and probably in Latium generally would seem to have been
determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many
parts of the world, namely exogamy, _beena_ marriage, and female
kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to
marry a woman of a different clan from his own: _beena_ marriage is
the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his
wife's people; and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of
tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women
instead of through men. If these principles regulated descent of the
kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in this
respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious
centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king's
hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king would be
a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another
race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the
kingdom with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit
their mother's name, not his; the daughters would remain at home;
the sons, when they grew up, would go away into the world, marry,
and settle in their wives' country, whether as kings or commoners.
Of the daughters who stayed at home, some or all would be dedicated
as Vestal Virgins for a longer or shorter time to the service of the
fire on the hearth, and one of them would in time become the consort
of her father's successor.

This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and
natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the
Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were
born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more
intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of this
sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child by a
man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily
compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than
with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin
kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a
general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special
relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women
reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such
Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution. In
our own country traces of them long survived in the practices of May
Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born of more or
less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this
kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular
festival was dedicated.

In this connexion it may be significant that a festival of jollity
and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome
on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially associated
with the fireborn King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of
Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The
popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and
boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which
young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have been a
sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which
fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the
great Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and
of fire; one of its principal features is the pairing of
sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw
flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of love and
marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic
season. It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence
and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us
to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser
features, which were probably of the essence of the rites. Indeed,
among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to have
lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present day. One
other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves to be
specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on
the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water
festival; and water has always, down to modern times, played a
conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day, which explains why
the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old heathen festival,
chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.

The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an
annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though the
traditional birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia, when
shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires, as lovers leap across
the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint
colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty
as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of
the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland
of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they
passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants,
strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be
natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and
forgetting it should provide them with another, which made up in
lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis, which
represented the kings not merely as sprung from gods but as
themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their
lifetime, as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid
claim to divinity.

If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home
and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of
another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage
with a native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners
wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list
of the Alban kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned
only through women--in other words, where descent through the mother
is everything, and descent through the father is nothing--no
objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men
of humble birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in
themselves the men appear to be suitable mates. What really matters
is that the royal stock, on which the prosperity and even the
existence of the people is supposed to depend, should be perpetuated
in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it is
necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to
men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the standard
of early society, to discharge the important duty of procreation.
Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of social
evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their
consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but
it is not essential that they should be so.

At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by
marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of
Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the
daughters of their predecessors. This tradition is to a certain
extent confirmed by evidence, pointing to the conclusion that at
Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship.

Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal
families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to
marry princesses and reign among their wives' people, it will follow
that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over
different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient
Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we may legitimately infer
that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan
stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions relate how a prince left his
native land, and going to a far country married the king's daughter
and succeeded to the kingdom. Various reasons are assigned by
ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common
one is that the king's son had been banished for murder. This would
explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at
all why he should become king of another. We may suspect that such
reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers, who, accustomed to the
rule that a son should succeed to his father's property and kingdom,
were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings' sons
who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom.
In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs.
For we read of daughters' husbands who received a share of the
kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these
fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in particular, during the five
generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of
the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden, are
reported in the _Heimskringla_ or _Sagas of the Norwegian Kings_ to
have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the
daughters of the local kings.

Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage
of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and
not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow
the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another
family, and often of another country, who marries one of the
princesses and reigns over his wife's people. A common type of
popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange
land, wins the hand of the king's daughter and with her the half or
the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real
custom.

Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the
kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood
royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of
the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary
queen of Scotland. "Indeed she was a queen," says Hermutrude, "and
but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this
is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once
a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre
and her hand went together." The statement is all the more
significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the
Pictish kings. We know from the testimony of Bede that, whenever a
doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose their kings from
the female rather than the male line.

The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance
and succession to the throne would naturally vary according to the
popular ideas of the time and the character of the king or his
substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early
society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place.

Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to
the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans
awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old
Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king,
and the one who reached him first was ennobled. According to
tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who
set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be
at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started. The
famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another
version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run for
no less a prize than a kingdom.

These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a
bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various
peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or
pretence. Thus "there is one race, called the 'Love Chase,' which
may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz.
In this the bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a fleet
horse, and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions
to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who catches
her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the
utmost, to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those
lovers who are unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the
one whom she has already chosen in her heart." The race for the
bride is found also among the Koryaks of North-eastern Asia. It
takes place in a large tent, round which many separate compartments
called _pologs_ are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a
start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the
compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of
the encampment place every obstacle in the man's way, tripping him
up, belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has
little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for
him. Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the
Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse languages
possess in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race.
Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern times.

Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a
princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic
contest. There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the
Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should
have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities
of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct,
the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort,
and in the character of these divinities went through the annual
ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops
to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they
did what in more northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of
May were believed to do in days of old. Now we have seen that the
right to play the part of the King of May and to wed the Queen of
May has sometimes been determined by an athletic contest,
particularly by a race. This may have been a relic of an old
marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom designed to
test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might
reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king in order to
ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the
performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which, even more
than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety
and prosperity of the community were believed to depend. And it
would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should
submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the sake of publicly
demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high
calling. A relic of that test perhaps survived in the ceremony known
as the Flight of the King (_regifugium_), which continued to be
annually observed at Rome down to imperial times. On the
twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the
Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred Rites fled
from the Forum. We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was
originally a race for an annual kingship, which may have been
awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year
the king might run again for a second term of office; and so on,
until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what
had once been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight
and a pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his
competitors ran after him, and if he were overtaken he had to yield
the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them.
In time a man of masterful character might succeed in seating
himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or
flight to the empty form which it seems always to have been within
historical times. The rite was sometimes interpreted as a
commemoration of the expulsion of the kings from Rome; but this
appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to explain a
ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten. It is far more
likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred Rites was merely
keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been
annually observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original
intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain more
or less a matter of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested
with a full sense of the difficulty and obscurity in which the
subject is involved.

Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king
was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office
awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious
athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as
a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the
fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in
supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a
god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better
understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them
are said to have come. We have seen that, according to tradition,
one of the kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously
mimicking the thunder of Jupiter. Romulus is said to have vanished
mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the
patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the day on
which he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the
Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take
certain remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the
attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from
the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among
themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each other.
Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine
colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium offering a
public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men, to whom he
had given umbrage, despatched him with the sacrificial knives and
spits which they had snatched from the altar. The occasion and the
manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a
sacrifice rather than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the
successor of Numa, was commonly said to have been killed by
lightning, but many held that he was murdered at the instigation of
Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him. Speaking of the more or less
mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that
"his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings. For of
the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his
life in exile, and of the remaining four not one died a natural
death; for three of them were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was
consumed by thunderbolts."

These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that
the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been
a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy
which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At
both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the
godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the
hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the
holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be
surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should
often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical
times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the
ordeal of battle, and he who cut his adversary's throat was thought
thereby to have proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of
cavil.




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