The Religion of Numa | Page 7

of private life, it was also closely related to the
specific occupations and interests of the people, and just as the interests
of the community, its means of livelihood, were agriculture and
stock-raising, so the gods were those of the crops and the herds. Some
years ago the late Professor Mommsen succeeded in extracting from
the existing stone calendars a list of the religious festivals of the old
Roman year, and also in proving that this list of festivals was complete
in its present condition at a time before the city of Rome was

surrounded by the wall which Servius Tullius built, and that it therefore
goes back to the old kingdom, the time of what has been called the
"Religion of Numa." We cannot go through all the festivals in detail,
but it is extremely interesting to notice that almost every one of them is
connected with the life of the farmer and represents the action of
propitiation towards some god or group of gods at every time in the
Roman year which was at all critical for agricultural interests.
It must not be forgotten also that this list is not absolutely complete,
because it represents merely the official state festivals, and not even all
of them but only those which fell upon the same day or days every year,
so that they could be engraved in the stone to form a perpetual calendar.
All state festivals, of which there were several, which were appointed
in each particular year according to the backward or forward estate of
the harvest, were omitted from the list, though they were celebrated at
some time in every year; and naturally the public calendars contained
no reference to the many private and semi-private ceremonies of the
year, with which the state had nothing official to do, festivals of the
family and the clan, and even local festivals of various districts of the
city.
In this list of peaceful deities of the farm there is one god whose
character has been very much misunderstood because of the company
which he keeps; this is the god Mars. It has become the fashion of late
to consider him as a god of vegetation, and a great many ingenious
arguments have been brought forward to show his agricultural character.
But the more primitive a community is, the more intense is its struggle
for existence, and the more rife its rivalries with its neighbours.
Alongside of the ploughshare there must always have been the sword or
its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres there must always have
been a god of strife and battle. That Mars was this god in early as well
as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always
worshipped outside the city, as a god who must be kept at a distance.
Naturally his cult was associated with the dominant interest of life, the
crops, and he was worshipped in the beautiful ceremony of the
purification of the fields, which Mr. Walter Pater has so exquisitely
described at the opening of Marius the Epicurean. But he was regarded

as the protector of the fields and the warder off of evil influences rather
than as a positive factor in the development of the crops. Then too in
the early days of the Roman militia, before the regular army had come
into existence, the war season was only during the summer after the
planting and before the harvest, so that the two festivals which marked
the beginning and the end of that season were also readily associated
with the state of the crops at that time.
But the most interesting and curious thing about this old religion is not
so much what it does contain as what it does not. It is not so much what
we find as what we miss, for more than half the gods whom we
instinctively associate with Rome were not there under this old regime.
Here is a partial list of those whose names we do not find: Minerva,
Diana, Venus, Fortuna, Hercules, Castor, Pollux, Apollo, Mercury, Dis,
Proserpina, Aesculapius, the Magna Mater. And yet their absence is not
surprising when we realise that almost all of the gods in this list
represent phases of life with which Rome in this early period was
absolutely unacquainted. She had no appreciable trade or commerce, no
manufactures or particular handicrafts, and no political interests except
the simple patriarchal government which sufficed for her present needs.
Her gods of water were the gods of rivers and springs; Neptune was
there, but he was not the ocean-god like the Greek Poseidon. Vulcan,
the god of fire, who was afterwards associated with the Greek
Hephaistos and became the patron of metal-working, was at this time
merely the god of destructive and