The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of AugustusFowler, W. Warde (William Warde)
Religion
The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus
Fowler, W. Warde (William Warde)
Cults -- Rome; Rome -- Religion
But Jupiter was there; and we know certain facts of his cult which give
us a pretty clear idea of what the Romans of the pre-Etruscan period
thought about him. In the calendar all Ides belonged to him, were
_feriae Iovis_;[256] he seems to be the source of light, whether of sun
or moon, for neither of which the Romans had any special divinity; in
the hymn of the Salii he is addressed as Lucetius, the giver or source
of light. The festivals of the vintage belonged to him, since the
production of wine specially needed the aid of sun and light, and his
flamen was employed in the cult on these occasions.[257] When rain was
sorely needed, the aid of the sky-god was sought under the cult-title
Elicius, and as Fulgur or Summanus[258] he was the Power who sent the
lightning by day and by night. The ideas thus reflected in the Roman
cult were common to all Italian peoples of the same stock; everywhere we
find him worshipped on the summits of hills, and in woods of oak, ilex,
or beech,[259] where nothing but the trees he loved intervened between
the heaven and the earth.
His oldest cult at Rome was on the Capitoline hill, but at all times
quite distinct from that which became so famous afterwards; he was known
here as Feretrius, a cult-title of which the meaning is uncertain,[260]
and here, so far as we can guess, there must have been an ancient oak
regarded either as the dwelling of the numen or as the numen himself,
upon which Romulus is said to have hung the _spolia opima_ taken from
the king of the Caeninenses;[261] here we may see the earliest trace of
the triumphal procession that was to be. Doubtless an _ara_ was here
from the first, and then followed a tiny temple, only fifteen feet wide
as Dionysius describes it from personal knowledge in the time of
Augustus,[262] who restored it. There was no image of the god, but in
the temple was kept a _silex_, probably a stone celt believed to have
been a thunderbolt;[263] this stone the Fetiales took with them on their
official journeys, and used it in the oath, _per Iovem lapidem_, with
which they ratified their treaties. As the Romans thought of Jupiter,
not as a personal deity living in the sky like Zeus, but rather as the
heaven itself, so they could think of him as immanent in this stone,
_Iuppiter lapis_. And the use of the flint in treaty-making suggests
another aspect of the god, which he retained in one way or another
throughout Roman history; it is his sanction that is called in to the
aid of moral and legal obligations, resulting from treaties, oaths, and
contracts such as that of marriage. As Dius Fidius he was invoked in the
common Roman oath _medius fidius_; as Farreus (if this were an old
cult-title) he gave his sanction to the solemn contract entered into in
the ancient form of marriage by _confarreatio_, where his flamen had to
be present, and where in all probability the cake of _far_ was eaten as
a kind of sacrament by the parties to the covenant.[264] In much of this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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