officiator would be called "fig-revealer," for such a name would at once let the mystic cat out of the bag.

A striking series of papers has appeared by Weniger in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft of 1906 and 1907, entitled "Feralis Exercitus," of which the main intention is an examination of the legend of Dionysos-Zagreus and the Titans. He explains the latter as Frost-demons of Parnassos, and supposes that the Phocians painted themselves white, in that famous night-attack of theirs, in imitation of them. But on the whole it is more probable that the Phocians on that occasion were only reviving the practice of war-paint, which had died out generally.

2

There is only space to call attention to Furtwängler's paper in the Archiv1 on "Zwei griechische Terracotten," which illustrates the sentence in Herodotus concerning the relation of Hephaistos to the Phoenician Pataiki; Herzog's two articles (ib. p. 201), " Aus dem Asclepieion von Kos," giving an interesting ritual-inscription concerning the worship of Demeter; Wide's "Chthonische und Himmlische Götter" (ib. 257), in which he explains Hera-whose name he connects with pws-as originally a chthonian goddess; and to Brueckner's, in the Athenische Mittheilungen of 1907, on "Athenische Hochzeitsgeschenke," which throws some light on private Athenian religion.

The students of Greek ritual will welcome the appearance (in 1906) of another part of the Leges Graecorum Sacrae, edited by De Prott and Ziehen.

The religious theory of certain philosophic systems in Greece is well treated by Auguste Diès in three articles—“ La Théologie dans les Philosophes Grecs "-in the Revue d'histoire et de littérature religieuses of 1906; starting with an estimate of Caird's Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, he has much to say that is interesting on Orphism and Pythagoreanism.

LEWIS R. FARNELL,

1 1907, p. 326.

2 iii. 37.

VIII

ROMAN MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION

THE most considerable work dealing with Roman mythology which has appeared in the last year is Ancient Legends of Roman History, by Ettore Pais: a series of lectures given in America. But the volume belongs more to Roman history than to the Roman religion, since it is in the main an attempt to explain the growth of a legendary history, both late and false, by myth-making suggested by cults or monuments. Many cults, indeed, as well as myths, are noticed in passing -among them the Regifugium and Poplifugium (which Pais seems to combine strangely on the same day), Lupercalia, etc. but only one deity receives the honour of a whole chapter— Acca Larentia. The want of an index, a most serious defect in a book of this kind, makes it impossible, without serious waste of time, to gather together the various references to other cults, and I must confine myself to a few words about the chapter on Acca.

Signor Pais's manner and methods are already pretty well known to us from his Storia di Roma. The fertility and ingenuity of his brain are fairly astonishing; but every statement he makes needs the most careful testing one has to be jumping from one's chair at every moment to see if his references bear out his statements. Before we have read a page and a half about Acca Larentia we feel this. In confuting Baehrens, who wished to read her name Laurentia, and to make her Acca of Laurentum, Pais opposes him with "the official reading of the Fasti, which always give Larentia." It is the work of a moment, fortunately, to look at the indices to the

Fasti in C. I. L. vol. i. ed. 2: the name never occurs in the official Fasti, and only once in the comments of Verrius Flaccus on the Fasti Praenestini, as Acca Larentin(a). This undermines the reader's confidence in his author, who probably meant to refer to the entries of the Larentalia-not quite the same thing. The next page still further destroys our confidence. Pais finds it easy to explain why Jupiter and Acca were worshipped on the same day (Dec. 23rd, Feriae Jovi and Larentalia), a point which Mommsen, Wissowa, and others have found difficult. Acca is a chthonic deity connected with burials, and as Dec. 23rd is at the winter solstice, Jupiter naturally dies on that day, like other solar deities, and apparently is buried also. This is Pais's solution: but there is no death or burial of a deity in all the Roman calendar; and if this be the survival of something much older than the calendar, he is bound to produce some evidence for such a survival in Rome or Italy. But he simply makes the statement, leaving the reader to digest it as he can. Before the end of the page is reached we find mention of a Jupiter Vulcan, the god of light, and are inclined to ask whether this is one of the many extraordinary misprints that disfigure the book (e.g. Libertina several times for Libitina, Innus for Inuus, etc.). But later on, p. 158, we come at last on the explanation, which, with some startling views about Vulcanus, "the supreme deity of Rome," will hardly satisfy a cautious. inquirer.

It seems hardly possible to give any clear account of the conclusions reached in this bewildering chapter. Acca is many things she is the mother of the Lares, "the dead ancestors of the Roman people": she is the she-wolf of Mars and bride of Faunus the goat-god: she is a courtesan also, and therefore represents "one of the fundamental conceptions of primitive Roman society": she is identical with Flora, Bona Dea, Volupia, Angerona, and many other deities: finally, under the all-enveloping influence of the cult of Her

1 Such e.g. as might be suggested by Dr. Frazer's Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, especially in Lect. IX.

cules, she becomes the faithless wife of Faunus or Faustulus, and the harlot of the Greek Herakles. Here and there in this phantasmagoria some enlightening suggestion may be found; but it is a relief to turn back from it to the masterly essay of Mommsen on the same subject, where, be the conclusions right or wrong the references can at any rate be relied on, and the evidence is marshalled without confusion.

Among the articles in Roscher's Lexicon, which appeared during the year, very few are on Roman subjects. Under the title Poeninus we have an excellent account by Ihm of the deity of the Great St. Bernard, called by the Romans Jupiter Poeninus, and of the site of the temple and the objects found there, chiefly votive tablets deposited by travellers. (See C. I. L. 56,865 ff., and for later discoveries the Notizie dei Scavi.) The collection is in the library on the upper floor of the monastery. Two articles by Wissowa may be mentioned, on Pomona (luckily a plain deity not calling for controversy) and Portunus, in whom Wissowa sees a god of gates like Janus, but one who became, through a change in the meaning of portus, specially connected with harbours, e.g. Ostia and the wharves at Rome. The view of Huelsen (Jordan, Röm. Top. i. 3. 143), that the small round temple near the Tiber, in the Foro Boario, is a temple of Portunus, is here fully accepted.

The Archiv für Religionswissenschaft for Nov. 1906 contained two valuable papers, by Von Domaszewski and Cumont respectively, on subjects lying outside of the Roman religion proper, viz. the recently discovered Jupiterpillar at Mainz, and a relief in the Berlin Museum, originally in Rome, with a figure of Jupiter and a dedication I(ovi) optimo) maximo) summo exsuperantissimo. In the pillar, with its representations of a number of deities, we have a remarkable example of the penetration of Graeco-Roman religious ideas into furthest Gaul from Massilia, where the prototype of this pillar was set up, as Domaszewski skilfully shows, between 17 B.C. and 12 B.C., while Augustus was in Gaul, and had the same political meaning as the Ara Pacis

and the Ara Fortunae Reducis in Rome. M. Cumont's paper is peculiarly interesting for students of religion under the Empire. He collects first the inscriptions relating to this strange Jupiter (none of them earlier than the second half of the second century), and then the literary allusions, finally taking us back to a passage in Cicero's Somnium Scipionis. The conclusion is that we have here an Oriental deity, with a doctrine belonging to that astrological religion of which the founders were the so-called Chaldaeans, and the legislators were the Greek theologians of the Alexandrian epoch. Deity and doctrine were introduced into the West by philosophers, and became ultimately part of an almost official cult, after the invasion of the Empire by Syrian worships.

In the same number of the Archiv is a short note by the present writer on the controversy about the Lares, which has recently been raging abroad. Is their origin to be found in the worship of ancestors, or in the cult of numina of the fields at the compita on the farm? Accepting the second of these views, I have tried to show in this note how the Lar may have found his way from the compitum into the house, viz. through the agency of the slaves of the farm. "As the slaves came to be more and more distinctly recognised as members of the economic community of which the house was the centre, the one deity whom they had always worshipped on the land followed them into the house." Reference may here be made also to a paper by the same writer, in the Hibbert Journal for July, on "Religion and Citizenship in Early Rome." The object is to show that the State, by over-organisation in matters religious (jus divinum), destroyed the religio, or fear of the supernatural, which was characteristic of the primitive Latin mind, and in so doing destroyed also the possible development of a real religion. The religio of the Roman, in the original sense of the word, only came to life again when he was out of reach of his jus divinum, or in times of great public danger, when his confidence in his own gods and priests was failing him. It may be added here that a history of the word religio, as it