CHAPTER XIV THE KING’S FIRE

|Sacred Marriage of the Fire-god with a woman.| Thus far we have dealt mainly with those instances of the Sacred Marriage in which a human being is wedded to the divine powers of vegetation or water. Now we pass to the consideration of a different class of cases, in which the divine bridegroom is the fire and his bride a human virgin. And these cases are particularly important for our present enquiry into the early Latin kingship, since it appears that the old Latin kings were commonly supposed to be the offspring of the fire-god by mortal mothers. The evidence which points to this conclusion is as follows.

|Legend of the birth of King Servius Tullius from the fire.| First, let us take the legend of the birth of King Servius Tullius. It is said that one day the virgin Ocrisia, a slave-woman of Queen Tanaquil, the wife of King Tarquin the elder, was offering as usual cakes and libations of wine on the royal hearth, when a flame in the shape of the male member shot out from the fire. Taking this for a sign that her handmaiden was to be the mother of a more than mortal son, the wise Queen Tanaquil bade the girl array herself as a bride and lie down beside the hearth. Her orders were obeyed; Ocrisia conceived by the god or spirit of the fire, and in due time brought forth Servius Tullius, who was thus born a slave, being the reputed son of a slave mother and a divine father, the fire-god. His birth from the fire was attested in his childhood by a lambent flame which played about his head as he slept at noon in the king’s palace. [639] This story, as others have pointed out before, [640] seems clearly to imply that the mother of Servius was a Vestal Virgin charged with the care and worship of the sacred fire in the king’s house. Now, in Promathion’s History of Italy, cited by Plutarch, a similar tale was told of the birth of Romulus himself. It is |Legend of the birth of Romulus from the fire.| said that in the house of the King of Alba a flame like to the male organ of generation hung over the hearth for many days. Learning from an oracle that a virgin should conceive by this phantom and bear a son of great valour and renown, the king bade one of his daughters submit to its embraces, but she disdained to do so, and sent her handmaid instead. Angry at her disobedience, her father ordered both the maidens to be put to death. But Vesta appeared to him in a dream, forbade the execution, and commanded that both the girls should be imprisoned until they had woven a certain web, after which they were to be given in marriage. But the web was never finished, for as fast as they wove it by day, other maidens, in obedience to the king’s orders, unwove it at night. Meantime the handmaiden conceived by the flame of fire, and gave birth to Romulus and Remus. [641] In this legend, as in the story of the birth of Servius Tullius, it is plain that the mother of the future King of Rome was both a slave and a priestess of Vesta. Orthodox Roman tradition always admitted that she was a Vestal, but naturally enough represented her as the king’s daughter rather than his slave. The god Mars, it was said, got her with child as she drew water in his sacred grove. [642] However, when we compare this legend with the similar story of the birth of Servius, we may suspect that Promathion has preserved, though perhaps in a perverted form, an old feature of the Latin kingship, namely, that one of the king’s parents might be, and sometimes was, a slave. Whether that was so or not, such tales at least bear witness to an old belief that the early Roman kings were born of virgins and of the fire. Similarly Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, passed for a |Legend of the birth of Caeculus from the fire.| son of Vulcan. It was said that his mother conceived him through a spark, which leapt from the fire and struck her as she sat by the hearth. She exposed the child near a temple of Jupiter, and he was found there beside a fire by some maidens who were going to draw water. In after-life he proved his divine birth by working an appropriate miracle. When an infidel crowd refused to believe that he was the son of a god, he prayed to his father, and immediately the unbelievers were surrounded with a flame of fire. [643] More than this, the whole of the Alban dynasty appear to have traced their descent from a Vestal, for the wife of King Latinus, their legendary ancestor, was named Amata [644] or Beloved, and this was the regular title bestowed on a Vestal after her election, [645] a title which cannot be fully understood except in the light of the foregoing traditions, which seem to shew that the Vestals were regularly supposed to be beloved by the fire-god. Moreover, fire is said to have played round the head of Amata’s daughter Lavinia, [646] just as it played round the head of the fire-born Servius Tullius. As the same prodigy was reported of Julus or Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, [647] we may suspect that a similar legend was told of his miraculous conception at the hearth.

|The Vestal Virgins seem to have been regarded as the wives of the fire-god.| Now we may take it as certain that the Romans and Latins would never have traced the descent of their kings from Vestal Virgins unless they had thought that such a descent, far from being a stain, was, under certain circumstances, highly honourable. What the circumstances were that permitted a Vestal to become a mother, not only with impunity but with honour and glory, appear plainly from the stories of the birth of Caeculus, Romulus, and Servius Tullius. If she might not know a mortal man, she was quite free, and indeed was encouraged, to conceive and bear a son to the fire-god. In fact the legends suggest that the Vestals were regularly regarded as the fire-god’s wives. This would explain why they were bound to chastity during their term of service: the bride must be true to her divine bridegroom. And the theory of chastity could be easily reconciled with the practice of maternity by allowing a man to masquerade as the fire-god at a sacred marriage, just as in Egypt the king disguised himself as the god Ammon when he wedded the queen, [648] or as among the Ewe tribes the priest poses as the python-god when he goes in to the human brides of the serpent. [649] Thus the doctrine of the divine birth of kings presents no serious difficulty to people who believe that a god may be made flesh in a man, and that a virgin may conceive and bear him a son. Of course the theory of the divine motherhood of the Vestals applies only to the early regal and therefore prehistoric period. Under the Republic the demand for kings had ceased, and with it, therefore, the supply. Yet a trace of the old view of the Vestals as virgin mothers lingered down to the latest times in the character of Vesta herself, their patroness and type; for Vesta always bore the official title of Mother, never that of Virgin. [650] We may surmise that a similar belief and practice once obtained in Attica. For Erichthonius, king of Athens, is said to have been a son of the fire-god Hephaestus by the virgin goddess Athena: the story told of his miraculous birth from the ground, which had been impregnated by the seed of the fire-god, is clearly a later version devised to save the virginity of his mother. [651] The perpetual lamp of Athena, which burned in the Erechtheum or house of Erechtheus (who was identical with Erichthonius) on the acropolis of Athens, [652] may have answered to the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome; and it is possible that the maidens called Arrephoroi or Errephoroi, who dwelt close to the Erechtheum, [653] may at one time have personated Athena and passed, like the Vestals, for wives of the fire-god.

|Rationalistic theory of the duties of the Vestals rejected.| It has, indeed, been held that the Vestals were of old the king’s daughters, who were kept at home and forbidden to marry for no other reason than that they might devote themselves to the domestic duties of drawing water, mopping the house, tending the fire, and baking cakes. [654] But this rationalistic theory could hardly explain the superstitious horror which the infidelity of a Vestal always excited in the Roman mind. Customs which begin in reason seldom end in superstition. It is likely, therefore, that the rule of chastity imposed on the Vestals was based from the first on a superstition rather than on a mere consideration of practical convenience. The belief that the Vestals were the spouses of the fire-god would explain the rule. [655] We have seen that the practice of marrying women to gods has been by no means uncommon. If the spirit of the water has his human wife, why not the spirit of the fire? Indeed, primitive man has a special reason for thinking that the fire-god should always be married. What that reason is, I will now try to explain.

|The Vestal fire of later times was a continuation of the fire on the king’s hearth.| But first it is necessary to apprehend clearly that the Vestal fire of republican and imperial Rome was strictly the successor or continuation of the fire which in the regal period had burned on the king’s hearth. That it was so appears plainly from the stories of the birth of Romulus and Servius Tullius, which shew that Vesta was believed to be worshipped at the royal fireside by maidens who were either the king’s daughters or his slaves. This conclusion is amply confirmed by a study of the temple of Vesta and the adjoining edifices in the Roman Forum. For the so-called temple of the goddess never was, strictly speaking, a temple at all. This fact we have on the authority of Varro himself, the greatest of Roman antiquaries. [656] The little round building in which the sacred fire always burned was merely a copy of the round hut in which the king, like his |The round temple of Vesta a copy of the ancient Italian hut.| subjects, had dwelt in days of old. Tradition preserved a memory of the time when its walls were made of wattled osiers and the roof was of thatch; [657] indeed, with that peculiar clinging to the forms of the past which is characteristic of royalty and religion, the inmost shrine continued down even to late times to be fashioned of the same simple materials. [658] The hut of Romulus, or what passed for it, constructed of wood, reeds, and straw, was always preserved and carefully repaired in the original style. It stood on the side of the Palatine hill facing the Circus Maximus. [659] A similar hut, roofed with thatch, was in like manner maintained on the Capitoline hill, and traditionally associated with Romulus. [660] The so-called temple of Vesta in historical times stood not on any of the hills, but in the Forum, at the northern foot of the Palatine. Its situation in the flat ground is quite consistent with the view that the building represents the king’s house of early, though not of the very earliest, times; for, according to tradition, it was built by Numa in this position between the Palatine and the Capitol, at the time when he united the two separate towns on these hills and turned the low swampy ground between them into their common place of assembly. Here, too, beside the temple of Vesta, the king built himself a house, which was ever afterwards known as the Regia or palace; formerly he had dwelt on the Quirinal. [661] In after-times this old palace of the kings was perhaps the official residence of their successor, the King of the Sacred Rites. [662] Adjoining it was the house of the Vestals, [663] at first, no doubt, a simple and unpretentious edifice, but afterwards a stately pile gathered round a spacious open court which must have resembled the cloister of a mediaeval monastery. We may assume that the kernel of this group of buildings was the round temple of Vesta, and that the hearth in it, on which burned the sacred fire, was originally the hearth of the king’s house. That the so-called temple was built on the model of the round huts of the old Latins is proved by the discoveries made at an ancient necropolis near Albano. The ashes of the dead were here deposited in urns, which are shaped like |Hut-urns found at Albano and Rome.| little round huts with conical roofs, obviously in order that the souls of the dead might live in houses such as they had inhabited during life. The roofs of these miniature dwellings are raised on cross-beams, sometimes with one or more holes to let out the smoke. The door is fastened by a crossbar, which is passed through a ring on the outside and tied to the two side-posts. In some of these hut-urns the side-posts are duplicated, or even triplicated, for the sake of ornament; and it is probable that the ring of columns which encircled the little temple of Vesta in historical times was merely an extension of the door-posts of the prehistoric hut. The necropolis in which these urns were found must be very ancient, since it was buried under the streams of lava vomited by the Alban Mountain in eruption. But the mountain has not been an active volcano within historical times, unless, indeed, the showers of stones and the rain of blood often recorded as ominous prodigies by Roman writers may be explained as jets of pumice and red volcanic dust discharged by one of the craters. [664] The prehistoric burial-ground lately discovered in the Roman Forum has yielded several hut-urns of precisely the same shape as those of the Alban cemetery. Hence we may infer with tolerable certainty that the earliest Latin settlers both on the Alban hills and at Rome dwelt in round huts built of wattle and dab, with peaked roofs of thatch. [665]

|“Numa’s crockery,” the primitive earthenware vessels used by the Vestals.| If further evidence were needed to convince us that the round temple of Vesta merely reproduced a Roman house of the olden time, it might be supplied by the primitive vessels of coarse earthenware in which the Vestals always presented their offerings, and which, in memory of the artlessness of an earlier age, went by the name of “Numa’s crockery.” [666] A Greek historian, writing when Rome was at the height of her power and glory under Augustus, praises the Romans for the austere simplicity with which, in an age of vulgar wealth and ostentation, they continued to honour the gods of their fathers. “I have seen,” said he, “meals set before the gods on old-fashioned wooden tables, in mats and earthenware dishes, the food consisting of barley loaves and cakes and spelt and firstfruits and such-like things, all plain and inexpensive and free from any touch of vulgarity. And I have seen libations offered, not in vessels of silver and gold, but in little earthen cups and jugs; and I heartily admired a people which thus walked in the ways of their fathers, not deviating from the ancient rites into extravagance and display.” [667] Specimens of this antique pottery have come to light of late years at the house of the Vestals, the temple of Vesta, and other religious centres in the Forum; [668] others had been found previously on the Esquiline hill and in the necropolis of Alba Longa. [669] We may conjecture that if the Romans continued to serve the gods their meals in simple earthenware dishes long after they themselves quaffed their wine from goblets of crystal and gold or from murrhine cups with their cloudy iridescent hues of purple and white, [670] they did so, not from any principle of severe good taste, but rather from that superstitious fear of innovation which has embalmed in religious ritual, as in amber, so many curious relics of the past. The old forms and materials of the vessels were consecrated by immemorial usage and might not be changed with impunity. Indeed, in the ritual of the Arval Brothers the holy pots themselves appear to have been an object of worship. [671] Specimens of these pots have been found on the site of the sacred grove where the Brothers performed their quaint service, and they shed an interesting light on the conservatism of the Roman religion. Some of them are moulded in the most primitive fashion by |Rude pottery used by the Arval Brothers.| the hand without any mechanical appliance. But most of them belong to a stage of art, later indeed than this rude beginning, yet earlier than the invention of the potter’s wheel. In order to give the vessels their proper shape and prevent the sides from collapsing, wooden hoops were inserted in them, and the marks made by these hoops in the soft clay may still be seen on the inside of most of the pots found in the grove. We may suppose that when the potter’s wheel came into universal use, the old art of making pottery by the hand was lost; but as religion would have nothing to do with pots made in the new-fangled way, the pious workman had to imitate the ancient ware as well as he could, eking out his imperfect skill with the aid of wooden hoops. [672] Perhaps the fictores Vestalium and the fictores Pontificum, of whom we read in inscriptions, [673] were those potters who, combining a retrograde art with sound religious principles, provided the Vestals and Pontiffs with the coarse crockery so dear to gods and to antiquaries. If that was so, they may have had in the exercise of their craft to observe some such curious rules as are still |Savage superstitions as to the making of pottery.| observed in similar circumstances by the savage Yuracares, a tribe of Indians living dispersed in the depths of beautiful tropical forests, at the eastern foot of the Bolivian Andes. We are told by an explorer that “the manufacture of pottery is not an everyday affair with this superstitious people, and accordingly they surround it with singular precautions. The women, who alone are entrusted with the duty, go away very solemnly to look for the clay, but they do so only when there is no crop to be gathered. In the fear of thunder they betake themselves to the most sequestered spots of the forest in order not to be seen. There they build a hut. While they are at work they observe certain ceremonies and never open their mouth, speaking to each other by signs, being persuaded that one word spoken would infallibly cause all their pots to break in the firing; and they do not go near their husbands, for if they did, all the sick people would die.” [674] Among the Ba-Ronga of South Africa pottery is made by women only, and they prefer to employ a child under puberty to light the fire in which the pots are to be baked, because the child has pure hands and the pots are therefore less likely to crack in the furnace than if the woman lit the fire herself. [675] If the reader objects that Roman potters cannot have been trammelled by superstitions like those which hamper the savage potters of America and Africa, I would remind him of the rules laid down by grave Roman writers for the moral guidance of cooks, bakers, and butlers. After mentioning a number of these writers by name, Columella informs us that “all of them are of opinion that he who engages in any one of these occupations is bound to be |Chastity required in persons who handle dishes and food.| chaste and continent, since everything depends on taking care that neither the dishes nor the food should be handled by any one above the age of puberty, or at least by any one who is not exceedingly abstemious in sexual matters. Therefore a man or woman who is sexually unclean ought to wash in a river or running water before he touches the contents of the storeroom. That is why there should be a boy or a maid to fetch from the storeroom the things that are needed.” [676] When Roman cooks, bakers, and butlers were expected to be so strict in the service of their human masters, it might naturally be thought that the potters should be not less so whose business it was to fashion the rude yet precious vessels meet for the worship of the gods.

|Sanctity of the storeroom (penus) and of the Penates in a Roman house.| If the storeroom (penus) of a Roman house was deemed so holy that its contents could only be handled by persons ceremonially clean, the reason was that the Penates or gods of the storeroom dwelt in it. [677] The domestic hearth, where the household meals were cooked in the simple days of old, was the natural altar of the Penates; [678] their images, together with those of the Lares, stood by it and shone in the cheerful glow of the fire, when the family gathered round it in the evening. [679] Thus in every house Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was intimately bound up with the Penates or gods of the storeroom; indeed, she was reckoned one of them. [680] Now the temple of Vesta, being nothing more than a type of the oldest form of Roman house, naturally had, like an ordinary house, its sacred storeroom, and its Penates or gods of the storeroom. [681] Hence if in every common house strict chastity was, theoretically at least, expected of all who entered the storeroom, we can well understand why such an obligation should have been laid on the Vestals, who had in their charge the holiest of all storerooms, the chamber in which were popularly supposed to be preserved the talismans on which the safety of the state depended. [682]

|Thus the temple of Vesta, with its perpetual fire and its sacred storeroom, was merely a copy of the Roman king’s house.| Thus on the whole we may regard it as highly probable that the round temple of Vesta in the Forum, with its sacred storeroom and perpetual fire, was merely a survival, under changed conditions, of the old house of the Roman kings, which again may have been a copy of the still older house of the kings of Alba. Both were modelled on the round huts of wattled osiers in which the early Latins dwelt among the woods and hills of Latium in the days when the Alban Mountain was still an active volcano. Hence it is legitimate to compare the old legends of the royal hearth with the later practice in regard to the hearth of Vesta, and from the comparison to explain, if we can, the meaning both of the legends and of the practice.