Section 5. Virbius and the Horse.
WE are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the
meaning of the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of
the Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of Hippolytus
by horses. Having found, first, that spirits of the corn are not
infrequently represented in the form of horses; and, second, that
the animal which in later legends is said to have injured the god
was sometimes originally the god himself, we may conjecture that
the horses by which Virbius or Hippolytus was said to have been
slain were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation. The
myth that he had been killed by horses was probably invented to
explain certain features in his worship, amongst others the custom
of excluding horses from his sacred grove. For myth changes
while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their
fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers
acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long
attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound
theory for an absurd practice. In the case before us we may be
sure that the myth is more modern than the custom and by no
means represents the original reason for excluding horses from the
grove. From their exclusion it might be inferred that horses could
not be the sacred animals or embodiments of the god of the grove.
But the inference would be rash. The goat was at one time a
sacred animal or embodiment of Athena, as may be inferred from
the practice of representing the goddess clad in a goat-skin
(aegis). Yet the goat was neither sacrificed to her as a rule, nor
allowed to enter her great sanctuary, the Acropolis at Athens. The
reason alleged for this was that the goat injured the olive, the
sacred tree of Athena. So far, therefore, the relation of the goat to
Athena is parallel to the relation of the horse to Virbius, both
animals being excluded from the sanctuary on the ground of injury
done by them to the god. But from Varro we learn that there was
an exception to the rule which excluded the goat from the
Acropolis. Once a year, he says, the goat was driven on to the
Acropolis for a necessary sacrifice. Now, as has been remarked
before, when an animal is sacrificed once and once only in the
year, it is probably slain, not as a victim offered to the god, but as
a representative of the god himself. Therefore we may infer that if a
goat was sacrificed on the Acropolis once a year, it was
sacrificed in the character of Athena herself; and it may be
conjectured that the skin of the sacrificed animal was placed on
the statue of the goddess and formed the aegis, which would thus
be renewed annually. Similarly at Thebes in Egypt rams were
sacred and were not sacrificed. But on one day in the year a ram
was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of the god
Ammon. Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove better, we
might find that the rule of excluding horses from it, like the rule of
excluding goats from the Acropolis at Athens, was subject to an
annual exception, a horse being once a year taken into the grove
and sacrificed as an embodiment of the god Virbius. By the usual
misunderstanding the horse thus killed would come in time to be
regarded as an enemy offered up in sacrifice to the god whom he
had injured, like the pig which was sacrificed to Demeter and
Osiris or the goat which was sacrificed to Dionysus, and possibly
to Athena. It is so easy for a writer to record a rule without noticing
an exception that we need not wonder at finding the rule of the
Arician grove recorded without any mention of an exception such
as I suppose. If we had had only the statements of Athenaeus and
Pliny, we should have known only the rule which forbade the
sacrifice of goats to Athena and excluded them from the Acropolis,
without being aware of the important exception which the fortunate
preservation of Varro's work has revealed to us. 1
The conjecture that once a year a horse may have been
sacrificed in the Arician grove as a representative of the deity of
the grove derives some support from the similar sacrifice of a
horse which took place once a year at Rome. On the fifteenth of
October in each year a chariot-race was run on the Field of
Mars. Stabbed with a spear, the right-hand horse of the victorious
team was then sacrificed to Mars for the purpose of ensuring good
crops, and its head was cut off and adorned with a string of
loaves. Thereupon the inhabitants of two wards-the Sacred Way
and the Subura-contended with each other who should get the
head. If the people of the Sacred Way got it, they fastened it to a
wall of the king's house; if the people of the Subura got it, they
fastened it to the Mamilian tower. The horse's tail was cut off and
carried to the king's house with such speed that the blood dripped
on the hearth of the house. Further, it appears that the blood of the
horse was caught and preserved till the twenty-first of April, when
the Vestal Virgins mixed it with the blood of the unborn calves
which had been sacrificed six days before. The mixture was then
distributed to shepherds, and used by them for fumigating their
flocks. 2
In this ceremony the decoration of the horse's head with a string
of loaves, and the alleged object of the sacrifice, namely, to
procure a good harvest, seem to indicate that the horse was killed
as one of those animal representatives of the corn-spirit of which
we have found so many examples. The custom of cutting off the
horse's tail is like the African custom of cutting off the tails of the
oxen and sacrificing them to obtain a good crop. In both the
Roman and the African custom the animal apparently stands for
the corn-spirit, and its fructifying power is supposed to reside
especially in its tail. The latter idea occurs, as we have seen, in
European folk-lore. Again, the practice of fumigating the cattle in
spring with the blood of the horse may be compared with the
practice of giving the Old Wife, the Maiden, or the clyack sheaf
as fodder to the horses in spring or the cattle at Christmas, and
giving the Yule Boar to the ploughing oxen or horses to eat in
spring. All these usages aim at ensuring the blessing of the
corn-spirit on the homestead and its inmates and storing it up for
another year. 3
The Roman sacrifice of the October horse, as it was called,
carries us back to the early days when the Subura, afterwards a
low and squalid quarter of the great metropolis, was still a
separate village, whose inhabitants engaged in a friendly contest
on the harvest-field with their neighbours of Rome, then a little
rural town. The Field of Mars on which the ceremony took place
lay beside the Tiber, and formed part of the king's domain down to
the abolition of the monarchy. For tradition ran that at the time
when the last of the kings was driven from Rome, the corn stood
ripe for the sickle on the crown lands beside the river; but no one
would eat the accursed grain and it was flung into the river in
such heaps that, the water being low with the summer heat, it
formed the nucleus of an island. The horse sacrifice was thus an
old autumn custom observed upon the king's corn-fields at the
end of the harvest. The tail and blood of the horse, as the chief
parts of the corn-spirit's representative, were taken to the king's
house and kept there; just as in Germany the harvest-cock is
nailed on the gable or over the door of the farmhouse; and as the
last sheaf, in the form of the Maiden, is carried home and kept
over the fireplace in the Highlands of Scotland. Thus the blessing
of the corn-spirit was brought to the king's house and hearth and,
through them, to the community of which he was the head.
Similarly in the spring and autumn customs of Northern Europe the
May-pole is sometimes set up in front of the house of the mayor or
burgomaster, and the last sheaf at harvest is brought to him as the
head of the village. But while the tail and blood fell to the king, the
neighbouring village of the Subura, which no doubt once had a
similar ceremony of its own, was gratified by being allowed to
compete for the prize of the horse's head. The Mamilian tower, to
which the Suburans nailed the horse's head when they
succeeded in carrying it off, appears to have been a peel-tower
or keep of the old Mamilian family, the magnates of the village.
The ceremony thus performed on the king's fields and at his house
on behalf of the whole town and of the neighbouring village
presupposes a time when each township performed a similar
ceremony on its own fields. In the rural districts of Latium the
villages may have continued to observe the custom, each on its
own land, long after the Roman hamlets had merged their separate
harvest-homes in the common celebration on the king's lands.
There is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the
sacred grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have
been the scene of a common harvest celebration, at which a
horse was sacrificed with the same rude rites on behalf of the
neighbouring villages. The horse would represent the fructifying
spirit both of the tree and of the corn, for the two ideas melt into
each other, as we see in customs like the Harvest-May. 4
