“The still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia’s trees—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.”
MACAULAY.
§ 1. Diana and Virbius
The lake of Nemi.
WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi—“Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Dian herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
Its tragic memories
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. In order to understand it aright we must try to form in our minds an accurate picture of the place where it happened; for, as we shall see later on, a subtle link subsisted between the natural beauty of the spot and the dark crimes which under the mask of religion were often perpetrated there, crimes which after the lapse of {p2} so many ages still lend a touch of melancholy to these quiet woods and waters, like a chill breath of autumn on one of those bright September days “while not a leaf seems faded.”
The Alban hills.
The Alban hills are a fine bold group of volcanic mountains which rise abruptly from the Campagna in full view of Rome, forming the last spur sent out by the Apennines towards the sea. Two of the extinct craters are now filled by two beautiful waters, the Alban lake and its lesser sister the lake of Nemi. Both lie far below the monastery-crowned top of Monte Cavo, the summit of the range, but yet so high above the plain that standing on the rim of the larger crater at Castel Gandolfo, where the Popes had their summer palace, you look down on the one hand into the Alban lake, and on the other away across the Campagna to where, on the western horizon, the sea flashes like a broad sheet of burnished gold in the sun.
The sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis.
The lake of Nemi is still as of old embowered in woods, where in spring the wild flowers blow as fresh as no doubt they did two thousand springs ago. It lies so deep down in the old crater that the calm surface of its clear water is seldom ruffled by the wind. On all sides but one the banks, thickly mantled with luxuriant vegetation, descend steeply to the water’s edge. Only on the north a stretch of flat ground intervenes between the lake and the foot of the hills. This was the scene of the tragedy. Here, in the very heart of the wooded hills, under the abrupt declivity now crested by the village of Nemi, the sylvan goddess Diana had an old and famous sanctuary, the resort of pilgrims from all parts of Latium. It was known as the sacred grove of Diana Nemorensis, that is, Diana of the Wood, or, perhaps more exactly, Diana of the Woodland Glade.?[1] Sometimes the lake and grove were called, after the nearest town, the lake {p3} and grove of Aricia.?[2] But the town, the modern Ariccia, lay three miles away at the foot of the mountains, and separated from the lake by a long and steep descent. A spacious terrace or platform contained the sanctuary. On the north and east it was bounded by great retaining walls which cut into the hillsides and served to support them. Semicircular niches sunk in the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels, which in modern times have yielded a rich harvest of votive offerings. On the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses, like those which we see in front of the piers of bridges to break floating ice. At present this terrace-wall stands back some hundred yards from the lake; in other days its buttresses may have been lapped by the water. Compared with the extent of the sacred precinct, the temple itself was not large; but its remains prove it to have been neatly and solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned with Doric columns of the same material. Elaborate cornices of marble and friezes of terra-cotta contributed to the outward splendour of the edifice, which appears to have been further enhanced by tiles of gilt bronze.?[3] {p4}
Wealth and popularity of the shrine.
The great wealth and popularity of the sanctuary in antiquity are attested by ancient writers as well as by the remains which have come to light in modern times. In the civil war its sacred treasures went to replenish the empty coffers of Octavian,?[4] who well understood the useful art of thus securing the divine assistance, if not the divine blessing, for the furtherance of his ends. But we are not told that he treated Diana on this occasion as civilly as his divine uncle Julius Caesar once treated Capitoline Jupiter himself, borrowing three thousand pounds’ weight of solid gold from the god, and scrupulously paying him back with the same weight of gilt copper.?[5] However, the sanctuary at Nemi recovered from this drain on its resources, for two centuries later it was still reputed one of the richest in Italy.?[6] Ovid has described the walls hung with fillets and commemorative tablets;?[7] and the abundance of cheap votive offerings and copper coins, which the site has yielded in our own day, speaks volumes for the piety and numbers, if not for the opulence and liberality, of the worshippers. Swarms of beggars used to stream forth daily from the slums of Aricia and take their stand on the long slope up which the labouring horses dragged well-to-do pilgrims to the shrine; and according to the response which their whines and importunities met with they blew kisses or hissed curses after the carriages as they swept rapidly down hill again.?[8] {p5} Even peoples and potentates of the East did homage to the lady of the lake by setting up monuments in her sanctuary; and within the precinct stood shrines of the Egyptian goddesses Isis and Bubastis, with a store of gorgeous jewellery.?[9]
Roman villas at Nemi.
The retirement of the spot and the beauty of the landscape naturally tempted some of the luxurious Roman nobles to fix their summer residences by the lake.?[10] Here Lucius Caesar had a house to which, on a day in early summer, only two months after the murder of his illustrious namesake, he invited Cicero to meet the assassin Brutus.?[11] The emperors themselves appear to have been partial to a retreat where they could find repose from the cares of state and the bustle of the great city in the fresh air of the lake and the stillness of the woods. Here Julius Caesar built himself a costly villa, but pulled it down because it was not to his mind.?[12] Here Caligula had two magnificent barges, or rather floating palaces, launched for him on the lake;?[13] and it was while dallying in the woods of Nemi that the sluggard Vitellius received the tidings of revolt which woke him from his dream of pleasure and called him to arms.?[14] Vespasian had a monument dedicated to his honour in the {p6} grove by the senate and people of Aricia: Trajan condescended to fill the chief magistracy of the town; and Hadrian indulged his taste for architecture by restoring a structure which had been erected in the precinct by a prince of the royal house of Parthia.?[15]
Diana as the mistress of wild animals.
Diana as the patroness of cattle.
Analogy of St. Leonhard in Germany.
Such, then, was the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, a fitting home for the “mistress of mountains, and forests green, and lonely glades, and sounding rivers,” as Catullus calls her.?[16] Multitudes of her statuettes, appropriately clad in the short tunic and high buskins of a huntress, with the quiver slung over her shoulder, have been found on the spot. Some of them represent her with her bow in her hand or her hound at her side.?[17] Bronze and iron spears, and images of stags and hinds, discovered within the precinct,?[18] may have been offerings of huntsmen to the huntress goddess for success in the chase. Similarly the bronze tridents, which have also come to light at Nemi, were perhaps presented by fishermen who had speared fish in the lake, or maybe by hunters who had stabbed boars in the forest.?[19] The wild boar was still hunted in Italy down to the end of the first century of our era; for the younger Pliny tells us how, with his usual charming affectation, he sat meditating and reading by the nets, while three fine boars fell into them.?[20] Indeed, some fourteen-hundred years later boar-hunting was a favourite pastime of Pope {p7} Leo the Tenth.?[21] A frieze of painted reliefs in terra-cotta, which was found in the sanctuary at Nemi, and may have adorned Diana’s temple, portrays the goddess in the character of what is called the Asiatic Artemis, with wings sprouting from her waist and a lion resting its paws on each of her shoulders.?[22] A few rude images of cows, oxen, horses, and pigs dug up on the site may perhaps indicate that Diana was here worshipped as the patroness of domestic animals as well as of the wild creatures of the wood.?[23] In like manner her Greek counterpart Artemis was a goddess not only of game but of herds. Thus her sanctuary in the highlands of north-western Arcadia, between Clitor and Cynaethae, owned sacred cattle which were driven off by Aetolian freebooters on one of their forays.?[24] When Xenophon returned from the wars and settled on his estate among the wooded hills and green meadows of the rich valley through which the Alpheus flows past Olympia, he dedicated to Artemis a little temple on the model of her great temple at Ephesus, surrounded it with a grove of all kinds of fruit-trees, and endowed it not only with a chase but also with a sacred pasture. The chase abounded in fish and game of all sorts, and the pasture sufficed to rear swine, goats, oxen, and horses; and on her yearly festival the pious soldier sacrificed to the goddess a tithe both of the cattle from the sacred pasture and of the game from the sacred chase.?[25] Again, the people of Hyampolis in Phocis worshipped Artemis and thought that no cattle throve like those which they dedicated to her.?[26] Perhaps then the images of cattle found in Diana’s precinct at Nemi were offered to her by herdsmen to ensure her blessing on their herds. In Catholic Germany at the present time the great patron of cattle, horses, and pigs is St. Leonhard, and models of cattle, horses, and pigs are dedicated to him, sometimes in order to ensure the health and increase of the flocks and herds through the coming year, sometimes in order to {p8} obtain the recovery of sick animals.?[27] And, curiously enough, like Diana of Aricia, St. Leonhard is also expected to help women in travail and to bless barren wives with offspring.?[28] Nor do these points exhaust the analogy between St. Leonard and Diana of Aricia; for like the goddess the saint heals the sick; he is the patron of prisoners, as she was of runaway slaves; and his shrines, like hers, enjoyed the right of asylum.?[29]
Nemi an image of Italy in the olden time.
So to the last, in spite of a few villas peeping out here and there from among the trees, Nemi seems to have remained in some sense an image of what Italy had been in the far-off days when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen, when the beechwoods and oakwoods, with their deciduous foliage, reddening in autumn and bare in winter, had not yet begun, under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those intruders of a later age, which nowadays we are apt to think of as characteristically Italian, the lemon and the orange.?[30]
Rule of succession to the priesthood of Diana at Nemi.
However, it was not merely in its natural surroundings that this ancient shrine of the sylvan goddess continued to be a type or miniature of the past. Down to the decline of Rome a custom was observed there which seems to transport us at once from civilisation to savagery. In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if {p9} at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy.?[31] He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The priest who slew the slayer.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. His eyes probably acquired that restless, watchful look which, among the Esquimaux of Bering Strait, is said to betray infallibly the shedder of blood; for with that people revenge is a sacred duty, and the manslayer carries his life in his hand.?[32] To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music—the background of forest shewing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter {p10} of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.
Possibility of explaining the rule of succession by the comparative method.
The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we can shew that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can shew, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.
Legend of the origin of the Nemi worship: Orestes and the Tauric Diana.
The King of the Wood.
I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the {p11} Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis). According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat.?[33] {p12}
Chief features of the worship of Diana at Nemi.
Importance of fire in her ritual.
Diana as Vesta.
Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a huntress, and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting expectant mothers an easy delivery.?[34] Again, fire seems to have played a foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake; and throughout the length and breadth of Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth.?[35] Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the goddess herself holding a torch in her raised right hand;?[36] and women whose prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows.?[37] Some one unknown {p13} dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family.?[38] The terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove?[39] may perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy candles in churches would be obvious.?[40] Further, the title of Vesta borne by Diana at Nemi?[41] points clearly to the maintenance of a perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at the north-east corner of the temple, raised on three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably supported a round temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum.?[42] Here the sacred fire would seem to have been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in terra-cotta was found on the spot,?[43] and the worship of a perpetual fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been common in Latium from the earliest to the latest times.?[44] Thus we know that among the ruins of Alba the Vestal fire was kept burning by Vestal Virgins, bound to strict chastity, until the end of the fourth century of our era.?[45] There were Vestals at {p14} Tibur?[46] and doubtless also at Lavinium, for the Roman consuls, praetors, and dictators had to sacrifice to Vesta at that ancient city when they entered on or laid down their office.?[47]
Diana’s festival on August 13 converted by the Christian Church into the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15.
The Virgin Mary seems to have succeeded Artemis and Diana as the patroness of the ripening fruits.
Survivals of Diana’s festival in Italy, Sicily, and Scandinavia.
The Virgin Mary and the goddess Anaitis.
At her annual festival, which, as we have just seen, was celebrated all over Italy on the thirteenth of August, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a purificatory ceremony in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a kid, cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs.?[48] The Christian Church appears to have sanctified this great festival of the virgin goddess by adroitly converting it into the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin on the fifteenth of August.?[49] The discrepancy of two days between the dates of the festivals is not a fatal argument against their identity; for a similar displacement of two days occurs in the case of St. George’s festival on the twenty-third of April, which is probably identical with the ancient Roman festival of the Parilia on April twenty-first.?[50] On the reasons which prompted this conversion of the festival of the Virgin Diana into the festival of the Virgin Mary, some light is thrown by a passage in the Syriac text of The Departure of My Lady Mary from this World, which runs thus: “And the apostles also ordered that there should be a commemoration of the blessed one on the thirteenth of Ab [that is, August; another MS. reads the 15th of Ab], on account of the vines bearing bunches (of grapes), and on account of the trees bearing fruit, that clouds of hail, bearing stones of wrath, might not come, and the trees be broken, and their fruits, and the vines with their clusters.”?[51] Here the festival of {p15} the Assumption of the Virgin is definitely said to have been fixed on the thirteenth or fifteenth of August for the sake of protecting the ripening grapes and other fruits. Similarly in the Arabic text of the apocryphal work On the Passing of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is attributed to the Apostle John, there occurs the following passage: “Also a festival in her honour was instituted on the fifteenth day of the month Ab [that is, August], which is the day of her passing from this world, the day on which the miracles were performed, and the time when the fruits of trees are ripening.”?[52] Further, in the calendars of the Syrian Church the fifteenth of August is repeatedly designated as the festival of the Mother of God “for the vines”;?[53] and to this day in Greece the ripening grapes and other fruits are brought to the churches to be blest by the priests on the fifteenth of August.?[54] Now we hear of vineyards and plantations dedicated to Artemis, fruits offered to her, and her temple standing in an orchard.?[55] Hence we may conjecture that her Italian sister Diana was also revered as a patroness of vines and fruit-trees, and that on the thirteenth of August the {p16} owners of vineyards and orchards paid their respects to her at Nemi along with other classes of the community. We have just seen that wine and apples still hanging on the boughs formed part of the festal cheer on that day; in an ancient fresco found at Ostia a statue of Diana is depicted in company with a procession of children, some of whom bear clusters of grapes;?[56] and in a series of gems the goddess is represented with a branch of fruit in one hand and a cup, which is sometimes full of fruit, in the other.?[57] Catullus, too, tells us that Diana filled the husbandman’s barns with a bounteous harvest.?[58] In some parts of Italy and Sicily the day of the Assumption of the Virgin is still celebrated, like Diana’s day of old, with illuminations and bonfires; in many Sicilian parishes the corn is then brought in sacks to the churches to be blessed, and many persons, who have a favour to ask of the Virgin, vow to abstain from one or more kinds of fruit during the first fifteen days of August.?[59] Even in Scandinavia a relic of the worship of Diana survived in the custom of blessing the fruits of the earth of every sort, which in Catholic times was annually observed on the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin.?[60] There is no intrinsic improbability in the view that for the sake of edification the church may have converted a real heathen festival into a nominal Christian one. Similarly in the Armenian Church “according to the express evidence of the Armenian fathers of the year 700 and later, the day of the Virgin was placed on September the fifteenth, because that was the day of Anahite, the magnificence of whose feast the Christian doctors hoped thereby to transfer to Mary.”?[61] This Anahite or Anaitis, as the Greeks called her, the Armenian predecessor of the Virgin Mary, was a great Oriental goddess, {p17} whose worship was exceedingly popular not only in Armenia but in the adjoining countries. The loose character of her rites is plainly indicated by Strabo, himself a native of these regions.?[62]
The 13th of August a harvest festival among the Celts of Gaul.
Among the ancient Celts of Gaul, who, to judge by their speech, were near kinsmen of the ancient Latins, the thirteenth of August appears to have been the day when the harvest was dedicated to the harvest-god Rivos.?[63] If that was so, we may conjecture that the choice of a day in mid-August for the solemn celebration of the harvest-home dates from the remote time when the ancestors of the Celtic and Italian peoples, having renounced the wandering life of the huntsman and herdsman, had settled down together in some land of fertile soil and temperate climate, where harvest fell neither so late as after the cool rainy summers of the North nor so early as before the torrid and rainless summers of southern Europe.
Egeria, water-nymph and wife of Numa.
But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi.?[64] Two lesser divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole, because here were established the mills of the modern village of Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its water.?[65] {p18} Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she was believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery.?[66] Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave the Romans had been inspired by communion with her divinity.?[67] Plutarch compares the legend with other tales of the loves of goddesses for mortal men, such as the love of Cybele and the Moon for the fair youths Attis and Endymion.?[68] According to some, the trysting-place of the lovers was not in the woods of Nemi but in a grove outside the dripping Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria gushed from a dark cavern.?[69] Every day the Roman Vestals fetched water from this spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitchers on their heads.?[70] In Juvenal’s time the natural rock had been encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of poor Jews, who were suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove. We may suppose that the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved down from the Alban hills to the banks of the Tiber they brought {p19} the nymph with them and found a new home for her in a grove outside the gates.?[71] The remains of baths which have been discovered within the sacred precinct,?[72] together with many terra-cotta models of various parts of the human body,?[73] suggest that the waters of Egeria were used to heal the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified their gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to the goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in many parts of Europe.?[74] To this day it would seem that the spring retains medicinal virtues.?[75]
Virbius, the male companion of Diana.
The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair, who learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and spent all his days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the virgin huntress Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his only comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of women,?[76] and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn, inspired his stepmother Phaedra with love of him; and when he disdained her wicked advances she falsely accused him to his father Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god {p20} sent a fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hoofs to death.?[77] But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded the leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young hunter back to life by his simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to Hades. But Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick cloud, disguised his features by adding years to his life, and then bore him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to the nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under the name of Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he reigned a king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had a comely son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father’s fate, drove a team of fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against Aeneas and the Trojans.?[78] Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi but elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special priest devoted to his service.?[79] Horses were excluded from the Arician grove and sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus.?[80] It was unlawful to touch his image. Some thought that he was the sun.?[81] “But the {p21} truth is,” says Servius, “that he is a deity associated with Diana, as Attis is associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus.”?[82] What the nature of that association was we shall enquire presently. Here it is worth observing that in his long and chequered career this mythical personage has displayed a remarkable tenacity of life. For we can hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus of the Roman calendar, who was dragged by horses to death on the thirteenth of August, Diana’s own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same name, who after dying twice over as a heathen sinner has been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint.?[83]
The legends of Nemi invented to explain the ritual.
Tradition that the grove of Nemi was dedicated by a Latin dictator.
It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories told to account for Diana’s worship at Nemi are unhistorical. Clearly they belong to that large class of myths which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the foundation of the worship is traced now to Orestes and now to Hippolytus, according as {p22} this or that feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real value of such tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of the worship by providing a standard with which to compare it; and further, that they bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by shewing that the true origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous antiquity. In the latter respect these Nemi legends are probably more to be trusted than the apparently historical tradition, vouched for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana by a certain Egerius Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin dictator, on behalf of the peoples of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and Ardea.?[84] This tradition indeed speaks for the great age of the sanctuary, since it seems to date its foundation sometime before 495 B.C., the year in which Pometia was sacked by the Romans and disappears from history.?[85] But we cannot suppose that so barbarous a rule as that of the Arician priesthood was deliberately instituted by a league of civilised communities, such as the Latin cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed down from a time beyond the memory of man, when Italy was still in a far ruder state than any known to us in the historical period. The credit of the tradition is rather shaken than confirmed by another story which ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the saying, “There are many Manii at Aricia.” This proverb some explained by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children.?[86] A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes.?[87] These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to the mythical Egeria,?[88] excite {p23} our suspicion. Yet the tradition recorded by Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction.?[89] Rather we may suppose that it refers to some ancient restoration or reconstruction of the sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the confederate states.?[90] At any rate it testifies to a belief that the grove had been from early times a common place of worship for many of the oldest cities of the country, if not for the whole Latin confederacy.?[91]
Evidence of the antiquity of the grove.
Another argument of antiquity may be drawn from some of the votive offerings found on the spot, such as a sacrificial ladle of bronze bearing Diana’s name in archaic Greek letters,?[92] and pieces of the oldest kind of Italian money, being merely shapeless bits of copper, unstamped and valued by weight.?[93] But as the use of such old-fashioned money {p24} survived in offerings to the gods long after it vanished from daily life,?[94] no great stress can be laid on its occurrence at Nemi as evidence of the age of the shrine.
§ 2. Artemis and Hippolytus
Origin of the Arician myths of Orestes and Hippolytus.
I have said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus, though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask ourselves, Why did the authors of these legends pitch upon Orestes and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood? In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood,?[95] were dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason for the exclusion of horses from the grove; but this by itself seems hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to probe deeper by examining the worship as well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus.
Worship of Hippolytus at Troezen.
Hippolytus a mythical being of the Adonis type.
He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the garden of the Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon’s sacred island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest who held office for life: every year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour; and his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with weeping and {p25} doleful chants, by unwedded maids, who also dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage.?[96] His grave existed at Troezen, though the people would not shew it.?[97] It has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime, and yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a goddess who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said, under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite.?[98] Certainly in the Hippolytus of Euripides the tragedy of the hero’s death is traced directly to the anger of Aphrodite at his contempt for her power, and Phaedra is nothing but a tool of the goddess. Moreover, within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there stood a temple of Peeping Aphrodite, which was so named, we are told, because from this spot the amorous Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly sports. Clearly the name would be still more appropriate if it was Aphrodite herself who peeped. And beside this temple of Aphrodite grew a myrtle-tree with pierced leaves, which the hapless Phaedra, in the pangs of love, had pricked with her bodkin.?[99] Now the myrtle, with its glossy evergreen leaves, its red and white blossom, and its fragrant perfume, was Aphrodite’s own tree, and legend associated it with the birth of Adonis.?[100] At Athens also Hippolytus was intimately associated with Aphrodite, for on the south side of the Acropolis, looking towards Troezen, a barrow or sepulchral mound in his memory was shewn, and beside it stood a temple of Aphrodite, said to have been founded by Phaedra, which bore the name of the temple of Aphrodite at {p26} Hippolytus.?[101] The conjunction, both in Troezen and in Athens, of his grave with a temple of the goddess of love is significant. Later on we shall meet with mounds in which the lovers of the great Asiatic goddess were said to lie buried.
The divine mistresses of Hippolytus associated with oaks.
If this view of the relation of Hippolytus to Artemis and Aphrodite is right, it is somewhat remarkable that both his divine mistresses appear to have been associated at Troezen with oaks. For Aphrodite was here worshipped under the title of Askraia, that is, she of the Fruitless Oak;?[102] and Hippolytus was said to have met his death not far from a sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, that is, Artemis of the Hollow Oak, for here the wild olive-tree was shewn in which the reins of his chariot became entangled, and so brought him to the ground.?[103]
Orestes at Troezen.
It may not be without significance that Orestes, the other mythical hero of Nemi, also appears in the legendary history of Troezen. For at Troezen there was a temple of Wolfish Artemis, said to have been dedicated by Hippolytus, and in front of the temple stood a sacred stone upon which nine men, according to the legend, had cleansed Orestes from the guilt of his mother’s murder. In the solemn rite they made use of water drawn from the Horse’s Fount; and as late as the second century of our era their descendants dined together on certain set days in a building called the Booth of Orestes. Before the building there grew a laurel-tree which was said to have sprung on the spot where the things used in purifying the matricide were buried. The old traveller Pausanias, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of ancient Greece, could not learn why {p27} Hippolytus dedicated a temple to Wolfish Artemis; but he conjectured that it might have been because he extirpated the packs of wolves that used to scour the country.?[104]
Hippolytus in relation to horses and wolves.
Another point in the myth of Hippolytus which deserves attention is the frequent recurrence of horses in it. His name signifies either “horse-loosed” or “horse-looser”;?[105] he consecrated twenty horses to Aesculapius at Epidaurus;?[106] he was killed by horses; the Horse’s Fount probably flowed not far from the temple which he built for Wolfish Artemis; and horses were sacred to his grandsire Poseidon, who had an ancient sanctuary in the wooded island across the bay, where the ruins of it may still be seen in the pine-forest.?[107] Lastly, Hippolytus’s sanctuary at Troezen was said to have been founded by Diomede, whose mythical connexion both with horses and wolves is attested. For the Veneti, at the head of the Adriatic, were famed for their breed of horses, and they had a sacred grove of Diomede, at the spot where many springs burst forth from the foot of a lofty cliff, forming at once the broad and deep river Timavus (the modern Timao), which flows with a still and tranquil current into the neighbouring sea. Here the Veneti sacrificed a white horse to Diomede; and associated with his grove were two others, sacred to Argive Hera and Aetolian Artemis. In these groves wild beasts were reported to lose their ferocity, and deer to herd with wolves. Moreover, the horses of the district, famed for their speed, were said to have been branded with the mark of a wolf.?[108] Thus Hippolytus was associated with the horse in many ways, and this association may have been used to explain more features of the Arician ritual than the mere exclusion of the animal from the sacred grove.?[109] {p28} To this point we shall return later on. Whether his relation to wolves was also invoked to account for any other aspect of the worship at Nemi we cannot say, since the wolf plays no part in the scanty notices of that worship which have come down to us.?[110] But doubtless, as one of the wild creatures of the wood, the beast would be under the special care of Diana.
Hair offered before marriage to Hippolytus and others.
The custom observed by Troezenian girls of offering tresses of their hair to Hippolytus before their wedding brings him into a relation with marriage, which at first sight seems out of keeping with his reputation as a confirmed bachelor. According to Lucian, youths as well as maidens at Troezen were forbidden to wed till they had shorn their hair in honour of Hippolytus, and we gather from the context that it was their first beard which the young men thus polled.?[111] However we may explain it, a custom of this sort appears to have prevailed widely both in Greece and the East. Plutarch tells us that formerly it was the wont of boys at puberty to go to Delphi and offer of their hair to Apollo; Theseus, the father of Hippolytus, complied with the custom,?[112] which lasted down into historical times.?[113] Argive maidens, grown to womanhood, dedicated their tresses to Athena before marriage.?[114] On the same occasion Megarian girls poured libations and laid clippings of their hair on the tomb of the maiden Iphinoe.?[115] At the entrance to the temple of Artemis in Delos the grave of two maidens was shewn under an olive-tree. It was said that long ago they had come as pilgrims from a far northern land with offerings to Apollo, and dying in the sacred isle were buried there. The Delian virgins before marriage used to cut off a lock of their hair, wind it on a spindle, and lay it on the maidens’ grave. The young men did the same, except that they twisted the down of their first beard round a wisp of grass or a green shoot.?[116] In some places it was Artemis who {p29} received the offering of a maiden’s hair before marriage.?[117] At Panamara in Caria men dedicated locks of their hair in the temple of Zeus. The locks were enclosed in little stone boxes, some of them fitted with a marble lid or shutter, and the name of the dedicator was engraved on a square sinking in the stone, together with the name of the priest for the time being. Many of these inscribed boxes have been found of late years on the spot. None of them bear the names of women; some of them are inscribed with the names of a father and his sons. All the dedications are to Zeus alone, though Hera was also worshipped with him at Panamara.?[118] At Hierapolis, on the Euphrates, youths offered of their beards and girls of their tresses to the great Syrian goddess, and left the shorn hair in caskets of gold or silver, inscribed with their names, and nailed to the walls of the temple.?[119] The custom of dedicating the first beard seems to have been common at Rome under the Empire.?[120] Thus Nero consecrated his first beard in a golden box, studded with costly pearls, on the Capitol.?[121]
Such offerings intended to communicate strength and fertility.
Egyptian practice.
Some light is perhaps thrown on the meaning of these practices by two ancient Oriental customs, the one Egyptian, the other Phoenician. When Egyptian boys or girls had recovered from sickness, their parents used to shave the children’s heads, weigh the hair against gold or silver, and give the precious metal to the keepers of the sacred beasts, who bought food with it for the animals according to their tastes. These tastes varied with the nature of the beast, and the beast varied with the district. Where hawks were worshipped, the keepers chopped up flesh, and calling the birds in a loud voice, flung the gobbets up into the air, till the hawks stooped and caught them. Where cats, or ichneumons, or {p30} fish were the local deities, the keepers crumbled bread in milk and set it before them, or threw it into the Nile. And similarly with the rest of the divine menagery.?[122] Thus in Egypt the offerings of hair went to feed the worshipful animals.
Syrian practice; sacrifice of chastity regarded as a substitute for the sacrifice of hair.
In the sanctuary of the great Phoenician goddess Astarte at Byblus the practice was different. Here, at the annual mourning for the dead Adonis, the women had to shave their heads, and such of them as refused to do so were bound to prostitute themselves to strangers and to sacrifice to the goddess with the wages of their shame.?[123] Though Lucian, who mentions the custom, does not say so, there are some grounds for thinking that the women in question were generally maidens, of whom this act of devotion was required as a preliminary to marriage.?[124] In any case, it is clear that the goddess accepted the sacrifice of chastity as a substitute for the sacrifice of hair.?[125] Why? By many people, as we shall afterwards see, the hair is regarded as in a special sense the seat of strength; and at puberty it might well be thought to contain a double portion of vital energy, since at that season it is the outward sign and manifestation of the newly-acquired power of reproducing the species. For that reason, we may suppose, the beard rather than the hair of the head is offered by males on this occasion. Thus the substitution permitted at Byblus becomes intelligible: the women gave of their fecundity to the goddess, whether they offered their hair or their chastity. But why, it may be asked, should they make such an offering to Astarte, who was herself the great goddess of love and fertility? What need had she to receive fecundity from {p31} her worshippers? Was it not rather for her to bestow it on them? Thus put, the question overlooks an important side of polytheism, perhaps we may say of ancient religion in general. The gods stood as much in need of their worshippers as the worshippers in need of them. The benefits conferred were mutual. If the gods made the earth to bring forth abundantly, the flocks and herds to teem, and the human race to multiply, they expected that a portion of their bounty should be returned to them in the shape of tithe or tribute. On this tithe, indeed, they subsisted, and without it they would starve. Their divine bellies had to be filled, and their divine reproductive energies to be recruited; hence men had to give of their meat and drink to them, and to sacrifice for their benefit what is most manly in man and womanly in woman. Sacrifices of the latter kind have too often been overlooked or misunderstood by the historians of religion. Other examples of them will meet us in the course of our enquiry. At the same time it may well be that the women who offered their hair to Astarte hoped to benefit through the sympathetic connexion which they thus established between themselves and the goddess; they may in fact have expected to fecundate themselves by contact with the divine source of fecundity. And it is probable that a similar motive underlay the sacrifice of chastity as well as the sacrifice of hair.
Hair offered to rivers as sources of fertility.
Delos and Delphi as centres of fertilisation and of fire.
If the sacrifice of hair, especially of hair at puberty, is sometimes intended to strengthen the divine beings to whom it is offered by feeding or fertilising them, we can the better understand, not only the common practice of offering hair to the shadowy dead,?[126] but also the Greek usage of shearing it for rivers, as the Arcadian boys of Phigalia did for the stream that runs in the depths of the tremendous woody glen below the city.?[127] For next perhaps to rain and sunshine, nothing in nature so obviously contributes to fertilise a country as its rivers. Again, this view may set in a clearer light the custom of the Delian youths and maidens, {p32} who offered their hair on the maidens’ tomb under the olive-tree. For at Delos, as at Delphi, one of Apollo’s many functions was to make the crops grow and to fill the husbandman’s barns; hence at the time of harvest tithe-offerings poured in to him from every side in the form of ripe sheaves, or, what was perhaps still more acceptable, golden models of them, which went by the name of the “golden summer.”?[128] The festival at which these first-fruits were dedicated may have been the 6th and 7th of the harvest-month Thargelion, corresponding to the 24th and 25th of May, for these were the birthdays of Artemis and Apollo respectively.?[129] In Hesiod’s day the corn-reaping began at the morning rising of the Pleiades, which then answered to our 9th of May,?[130] and in Greece the wheat is still ripe about that time.?[131] In return for these offerings the god sent out a sacred new fire from both his great sanctuaries at Delos and Delphi, thus radiating from them, as from central suns, the divine blessings of heat and light. A ship brought the new fire every year from Delos to Lemnos, the sacred island of the fire-god Hephaestus, where all fires were put out before its arrival, to be afterwards rekindled at the pure flame.?[132] The fetching of the new fire from Delphi to Athens appears to have been a ceremony of great solemnity and pomp. All the chief Athenian magistrates repaired to Delphi for the purpose. The holy fire blazed or smouldered in a sacred {p33} tripod borne on a chariot and tended by a woman who was called the Fire-bearer. Soldiers, both horse and foot, escorted it; magistrates, priests, and heralds accompanied it; and the procession moved to the music of trumpet and fife.?[133] We do not know on what occasion the fire was thus solemnly sent from Delphi to Athens, but we may conjecture that it was when the Pythaists at Athens, watching from the hearth of Lightning Zeus, saw lightning flash over Harma on Mount Parnes, for then they sent a sacrifice to Delphi and may have received the fire in return.?[134] After the great defeat of the Persians at Plataea, the people of that city extinguished all the fires in the country, deeming them defiled by the presence of the barbarians. Having done so they relit them at a pure new fire fetched by a runner from the altar of the common hearth at Delphi.?[135]
The graves of Apollo and Artemis at Delos.
Now the maidens on whose grave the Delian youths and damsels laid their shorn locks before marriage, were said to have died in the island after bringing the harvest offering, wrapt in wheaten straw, from the land of the Hyperboreans in the far north.?[136] Thus they were in popular opinion the mythical representatives of those bands of worshippers who bore, year by year, the yellow sheaves with dance and song to Delos. But in fact they had once been much more than this. For an examination of their names, which are commonly given as Hekaerge and Opis, has led modern scholars to conclude, with every appearance of probability, that these maidens were originally mere duplicates of Artemis herself.?[137] Perhaps indeed we may {p34} go a step farther. For sometimes one of this pair of Hyperboreans appears as a male, not a female, under the name of the Far-shooter (Hekaergos), which was a common epithet of Apollo.?[138] This suggests that the two were originally the heavenly twins themselves, Apollo and Artemis, and that the two graves which were shewn at Delos, one before and the other behind the sanctuary of Artemis, may have been at first the tombs of these great deities, who were thus laid to their rest on the spot where they had been born. As the one grave received offerings of hair, so the other received the ashes of the victims which were burned on the altar.?[139] Both sacrifices, if I am right, were designed to strengthen and fertilise the divine powers who made the earth to wave with the golden harvest, and whose mortal remains, like the miracle-working bones of saints in the Middle Ages, brought wealth to their fortunate possessors. Ancient piety was not shocked by the sight of the tomb of a dead god. The grave of Apollo himself was shewn at his other great sanctuary of Delphi,?[140] and this perhaps explains its disappearance at Delos. The priests of the rival shrines may have calculated that one tomb sufficed even for a god, and that two might prove a stumbling-block to any but the most robust faith. Acting on this prudent conviction, they may have adjusted their respective claims to the possession of the holy sepulchre {p35} by leaving Apollo to sleep undisturbed at Delphi, while his grave at Delos was dexterously converted into the tomb of a blessed virgin by the easy grammatical change of Hekaergos into Hekaerge.
Hippolytus and Artemis.
Artemis a goddess of the wild life of nature.
Artemis not originally regarded as a virgin.
Artemis a goddess of childbirth.
The Ephesian Artemis.
But how, it may be asked, does all this apply to Hippolytus? Why attempt to fertilise the grave of a bachelor who paid all his devotions to a barren virgin? What seed could take root and spring up in so stony a soil? The question implies the popular modern notion of Diana or Artemis as the pattern of a straight-laced maiden lady with a taste for hunting. No notion could well be further from the truth. To the ancients, on the contrary, she was the ideal and embodiment of the wild life of nature—the life of plants, of animals, and of men—in all its exuberant fertility and profusion. As a recent German writer has admirably put it: “From of old a great goddess of nature was everywhere worshipped in Greece. She was revered on the mountain heights as in the swampy lowlands, in the rustling woods and by the murmuring spring. To the Greek her hand was everywhere apparent. He saw her gracious blessing in the sprouting meadow, in the ripening corn, in the healthful vigour of all living things on earth, whether the wild creatures of the wood and the fell, or the cattle which man has tamed to his service, or man’s own offspring from the cradle upward. Her destroying anger he perceived in the blight of vegetation, in the inroads of wild beasts on his fields and orchards, as well as in the last mysterious end of life, in death. No empty personification, like the earth conceived as a goddess, was this deity, for such abstractions are foreign to every primitive religion; she was an all-embracing power of nature, everywhere the object of a similar faith, however her names differed with the place in which she was believed to abide, with the emphasis laid on her gloomy or kindly aspect, or with the particular side of her energy which was specially revered. And as the Greek divided everything in animated nature into male and female, he could not imagine this female power of nature without her male counterpart. Hence in a number of her older worships we find Artemis associated with a nature-god of similar character, to whom tradition assigned {p36} different names in different places. In Laconia, for instance, she was mated with the old Peloponnesian god Karneios, in Arcadia more than once with Poseidon, elsewhere with Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus, and so on.”?[141] The truth is, that the word parthenos applied to Artemis, which we commonly translate virgin, means no more than an unmarried woman,?[142] and in early days the two things were by no means the same. With the growth of a purer morality among men a stricter code of ethics is imposed by them upon their gods; the stories of the cruelty, deceit, and lust of these divine beings are glossed lightly over or flatly rejected as blasphemies, and the old ruffians are set to guard the laws which before they broke. In regard to Artemis, even the ambiguous parthenos seems to have been merely a popular epithet, not an official title. As Dr. Farnell has well pointed out, there was no public worship of Artemis the chaste; so far as her sacred titles bear on the relation of the sexes, they shew that, on the contrary, she was, like Diana in Italy, specially concerned with the {p37} loss of virginity and with child-bearing, and that she not only assisted but encouraged women to be fruitful and multiply; indeed, if we may take Euripides’s word for it, in her capacity of midwife she would not even speak to childless women. Further, it is highly significant that while her titles and the allusions to her functions mark her out clearly as the patroness of childbirth, we find none that recognise her distinctly as a deity of marriage.?[143] Nothing, however, sets the true character of Artemis as a goddess of fecundity, though not of wedlock, in a clearer light than her constant identification with the unmarried, but not chaste, Asiatic goddesses of love and fertility, who were worshipped with rites of notorious profligacy at their popular sanctuaries.?[144] At Ephesus, the most celebrated of all the seats of her worship,?[145] her universal motherhood was set forth unmistakably in her sacred image. Copies of it have come down to us which agree in their main features, though they differ from each other in some details. They represent the goddess with a multitude of protruding breasts; the heads of animals of many kinds, both wild and tame, spring from the front of her body in a series of bands that extend from the breasts to the feet; bees, roses, {p38} and sometimes butterflies, decorate her sides from the hips downward. The animals that thus appear to issue from her person vary in the different copies of the statue; they include lions, bulls, stags, horses, goats, and rams. Moreover, lions rest on her upper arms; in at least one copy, serpents twine round her lower arms; her bosom is festooned with a wreath of blossoms, and she wears a necklace of acorns. In one of the statues the breast of her robe is decorated with two winged male figures, who hold sheaves in both hands.?[146] It would be hard to devise a more expressive symbol of exuberant fertility, of prolific maternity, than these remarkable images. No doubt the Ephesian Artemis, with her eunuch priests and virgin priestesses,?[147] was an Oriental, whose worship the Greek colonists took over from the aborigines.?[148] But that they should have adopted it and identified the goddess with their own Artemis is proof enough that the Grecian divinity, like her Asiatic sister, was at bottom a personification of the teeming life of nature.
Hippolytus the male consort of Artemis.
To return now to Troezen, we shall probably be doing no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis if we suppose that the relation between them was once of a tenderer nature {p39} than appears in classical literature. We may conjecture that if he spurned the love of women, it was because he enjoyed the love of a goddess.?[149] On the principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort. If I am right, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess, and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the fertility of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered from a dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again. Moreover, at Troezen itself, and apparently within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy to show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the express purpose of ensuring good crops.?[150] In the story of the tragic death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess. These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty {p40} fleeting as the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the relation of the life of man to the life of nature—a sad philosophy which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that practice were we shall learn later on.
§ 3. Recapitulation
Virbius the male consort of Diana.
We can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in general, and of childbirth in particular.?[151] As such she, like her Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one after the other, to a violent end.?[152] It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same relation in which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself.?[153] If the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife. There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in the time of Pliny a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess.?[154] The custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still practised in India and other {p41} parts of the East.?[155] Why should it not have obtained in ancient Latium?
Summary of results.
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana’s own functions by succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion, Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.
The double-headed bust at Nemi probably a portrait of the King of the Wood and his successor.
A curious monument of the ill-fated dynasty appears to have come down to us in a double-headed bust which was found in the sanctuary at Nemi. It represents two men of heavy and somewhat coarse features and a grim expression. The type of face is similar in both heads, but there are marked differences between them; for while the one is young and beardless with shut lips and a steadfast gaze, the other is a man of middle life with a tossed and matted beard, wrinkled brows, a wild anxious look in the eyes, and an open grinning mouth. But perhaps the most singular thing about the two heads are the leaves with scalloped edges which are plastered, so to say, on the necks of both busts and apparently also under the eyes of the younger figure. The leaves have been interpreted as oak leaves, and this interpretation, which is not free from doubt, is confirmed by the resemblance to an oak leaf which the {p42} moustache of the older figure clearly presents when viewed in profile. Various explanations of this remarkable monument have been proposed; but the most probable theory appears to be that the older figure represents the priest of Nemi, the King of the Wood, in possession, while the other face is that of his youthful adversary and possible successor. This theory would explain the coarse heavy type of both faces, which is neither Greek nor Roman but apparently barbarian; for as the priest of Nemi had always to be a runaway slave, he would commonly be a member of an alien and barbarous race. Further, it would explain the striking contrast between the set determined gaze of the younger man and the haggard, scared look of the older; on the one face we seem to read the resolution to kill, on the other the fear to die. Lastly, it would explain very simply the leaves that cling like cerements to the necks and breasts of both; for we shall see later on that the priest was probably regarded as an embodiment of the tree which he guarded, and human representatives of tree spirits are most naturally draped in the foliage of the tree which they personate. Hence if the leaves on the two heads are indeed oak leaves, as they have been thought to be, we should have to conclude that the tree which the King of the Wood guarded and personated was an oak. There are independent reasons for holding that this was so, but the consideration of them must be deferred for the present.?[156]
A wider survey required to solve the problem of Nemi.
Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But perhaps the survey of a wider field may lead us to {p43} think that they contain in germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now address ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but may possess something of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in which we shall visit many strange foreign lands, with strange foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in the shrouds: we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy behind us for a time.