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Chapter 14. The Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium
In regard to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited by his
successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the foregoing discussion has led us to
the following conclusions. He represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the
great god of the sky, the thunder, and the oak, and in that character made
rain, thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more
kings of the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only
mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity,
but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been merely a
local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods, of waters, and of
child-birth. All these conclusions, which we have reached mainly by a
consideration of the Roman evidence, may with great probability be applied to
the other Latin communities. They too probably had of old their divine or
priestly kings, who transmitted their religious functions, without their civil
powers, to their successors the Kings of the Sacred Rites.
But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the kingdom
among the old Latin tribes? According to tradition, there were in all eight
kings of Rome, and with regard to the five last of them, at all events, we can
hardly doubt that they actually sat on the throne, and that the traditional
history of their reigns is, in its main outlines, correct. Now it is very
remarkable that though the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been
descended from the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented
as hereditary in the male line, not one of the Roman kings was immediately
succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left sons or grandsons behind
them. On the other hand, one of them was descended from a former king through
his mother, not through his father, and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the
elder Tarquin, and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their sons-in-law, who
were all either foreigners or of foreign descent. This suggests that the right
to the kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was actually exercised
by foreigners who married the royal princesses. To put it in technical
language, the succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium
generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have
moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy, beena
marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule which obliges
a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own: beena marriage is
the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his wife's
people; and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of tracing relationship
and transmitting the family name through women instead of through men. If
these principles regulated descent of the kingship among the ancient Latins,
the state of things in this respect would be somewhat as follows. The
political and religious centre of each community would be the perpetual fire
on the king's hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king
would be a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another
race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the kingdom
with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit their mother's name,
not his; the daughters would remain at home; the sons, when they grew up,
would go away into the world, marry, and settle in their wives' country,
whether as kings or commoners. Of the daughters who stayed at home, some or
all would be dedicated as Vestal Virgins for a longer or shorter time to the
service of the fire on the hearth, and one of them would in time become the
consort of her father's successor.
This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and natural
way some obscure features in the traditional history of the Latin kingship.
Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were born of virgin mothers and
divine fathers become at least more intelligible. For, stripped of their
fabulous element, tales of this sort mean no more than that a woman has been
gotten with child by a man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is
more easily compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than
with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin kings
their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general
looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral
rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the
licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of
social evolution. In our own country traces of them long survived in the
practices of May Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born of
more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this
kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular festival
was dedicated.
In this connexion it may be significant that a festival of jollity and
drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome on Midsummer
Day, and that the festival was specially associated with the fireborn King
Servius Tullius, being held in honour of Fortuna, the goddess who loved
Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The popular merrymakings at this season included
foot-races and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in
which young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have been a sort
of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at
Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the great Midsummer
festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire; one of its
principal features is the pairing of sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires
hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens
of love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic
season. It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence and beauty
of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that
in earlier days they were marked by coarser features, which were probably of
the essence of the rites. Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these
features seem to have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the
present day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves
to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on the
river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water festival; and
water has always, down to modern times, played a conspicuous part in the rites
of Midsummer Day, which explains why the Church, in throwing its cloak over
the old heathen festival, chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.
The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an annual
festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though the traditional
birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia, when shepherds leaped across the
spring bonfires, as lovers leap across the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be
thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible
that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after
the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the
cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they
passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and
pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the
people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it should provide them with
another, which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final
apotheosis, which represented the kings not merely as sprung from gods but as
themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their lifetime,
as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid claim to divinity.
If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home and
received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of another country,
who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a native princess, we
can understand not only why foreigners wore the crown at Rome, but also why
foreign names occur in the list of the Alban kings. In a state of society
where nobility is reckoned only through womenin other words, where descent
through the mother is everything, and descent through the father is nothingno
objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble
birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to
be suitable mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the
prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend, should
be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it is
necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to men who
are physically and mentally fit, according to the standard of early society,
to discharge the important duty of procreation. Thus the personal qualities of
the kings at this stage of social evolution are deemed of vital importance. If
they, like their consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the
better; but it is not essential that they should be so.
At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by
marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of Athens,
namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the daughters of their
predecessors. This tradition is to a certain extent confirmed by evidence,
pointing to the conclusion that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female
kinship.
Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal
families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to marry
princesses and reign among their wives' people, it will follow that the male
descendants would reign in successive generations over different kingdoms. Now
this seems to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from
which we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more than
one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions relate how a
prince left his native land, and going to a far country married the king's
daughter and succeeded to the kingdom. Various reasons are assigned by ancient
Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common one is that the
king's son had been banished for murder. This would explain very well why he
fled his own land, but it is no reason at all why he should become king of
another. We may suspect that such reasons are afterthoughts devised by
writers, who, accustomed to the rule that a son should succeed to his father's
property and kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of
kings' sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign
kingdom. In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs. For
we read of daughters' husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of their
royal fathers-in-law, even when these fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in
particular, during the five generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired,
male members of the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden,
are reported in the Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norwegian Kings to have
obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of
the local kings.
Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage of
their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and not men as
the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow the kingdom in each
successive generation on a man of another family, and often of another
country, who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife's people.
A common type of popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a
strange land, wins the hand of the king's daughter and with her the half or
the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real custom.
Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the
kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal.
The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very
clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland. Indeed she
was a queen, says Hermutrude, and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be
deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of
her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her
sceptre and her hand went together. The statement is all the more significant
because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings. We
know from the testimony of Bede that, whenever a doubt arose as to the
succession, the Picts chose their kings from the female rather than the male
line.
The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance and
succession to the throne would naturally vary according to the popular ideas
of the time and the character of the king or his substitute, but it is
reasonable to suppose that among them in early society physical strength and
beauty would hold a prominent place.
Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to the
throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans awarded the
kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old Prussians, candidates for
nobility raced on horseback to the king, and the one who reached him first was
ennobled. According to tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by
Endymion, who set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to
be at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started. The famous
story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another version of the legend
that the first races at Olympia were run for no less a prize than a kingdom.
These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a
bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various peoples,
though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or pretence. Thus
there is one race, called the 'Love Chase,' which may be considered a part of
the form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a
formidable whip, mounts a fleet horse, and is pursued by all the young men who
make any pretensions to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who
catches her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the utmost,
to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are
unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the one whom she has already
chosen in her heart. The race for the bride is found also among the Koryaks
of North-eastern Asia. It takes place in a large tent, round which many
separate compartments called pologs are arranged in a continuous circle. The
girl gets a start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the
compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the
encampment place every obstacle in the man's way, tripping him up, belabouring
him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little chance of succeeding
unless the girl wishes it and waits for him. Similar customs appear to have
been practised by all the Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and
Norse languages possess in common a word for marriage which means simply
bride-race. Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern times.
Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a princess,
has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic contest. There would be no
reason, therefore, for surprise if the Roman kings, before bestowing their
daughters in marriage, should have resorted to this ancient mode of testing
the personal qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my
theory is correct, the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine
consort, and in the character of these divinities went through the annual
ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and
men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they did what in more
northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May were believed to do in
days of old. Now we have seen that the right to play the part of the King of
May and to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by an athletic
contest, particularly by a race. This may have been a relic of an old marriage
custom of the sort we have examined, a custom designed to test the fitness of
a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might reasonably be applied with
peculiar rigour to the king in order to ensure that no personal defect should
incapacitate him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on
which, even more than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the
safety and prosperity of the community were believed to depend. And it would
be natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit himself
afresh to the same ordeal for the sake of publicly demonstrating that he was
still equal to the discharge of his high calling. A relic of that test perhaps
survived in the ceremony known as the Flight of the King (regifugium), which
continued to be annually observed at Rome down to imperial times. On the
twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the Comitium,
and when it was over the King of the Sacred Rites fled from the Forum. We may
conjecture that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual
kingship, which may have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At
the end of the year the king might run again for a second term of office; and
so on, until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what
had once been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight and a
pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran after
him, and if he were overtaken he had to yield the crown and perhaps his life
to the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of masterful character might
succeed in seating himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual
race or flight to the empty form which it seems always to have been within
historical times. The rite was sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the
expulsion of the kings from Rome; but this appears to have been a mere
afterthought devised to explain a ceremony of which the old meaning was
forgotten. It is far more likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred
Rites was merely keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had
been annually observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original
intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain more or less a
matter of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested with a full sense
of the difficulty and obscurity in which the subject is involved.
Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king was a
relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office awarded, along with the
hand of a princess, to the victorious athlete or gladiator, who thereafter
figured along with his bride as a god and goddess at a sacred marriage
designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am
right in supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a
god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better
understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them are said to
have come. We have seen that, according to tradition, one of the kings of Alba
was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously mimicking the thunder of Jupiter.
Romulus is said to have vanished mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut
to pieces by the patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the
day on which he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the
Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take certain
remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons
and maids, and in this guise they went forth from the city, scoffed and jeered
at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and
throwing stones at each other. Another Roman king who perished by violence was
Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium
offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men, to whom he
had given umbrage, despatched him with the sacrificial knives and spits which
they had snatched from the altar. The occasion and the manner of his death
suggest that the slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather than an
assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa, was commonly
said to have been killed by lightning, but many held that he was murdered at
the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him. Speaking of the more
or less mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that
his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings. For of the five who
reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of the
remaining four not one died a natural death; for three of them were
assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts.
These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that the
contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been a mortal
combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy which we have traced
between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings,
the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer
deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his
divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It
would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom
should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times
the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the ordeal of
battle, and he who cut his adversary's throat was thought thereby to have
proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of cavil.
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