Chapter 58. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity.
Section 1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome.
WE are now prepared to notice the use of the human scapegoat in
classical antiquity. Every year on the fourteenth of March a man clad in
skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome, beaten with long
white rods, and driven out of the city. He was called Mamurius Veturius,
that is, "the old Mars," and as the ceremony took place on the day
preceding the first full moon of the old Roman year (which began on the
first of March), the skin-clad man must have represented the Mars of the
past year, who was driven out at the beginning of a new one. Now Mars
was originally not a god of war but of vegetation. For it was to Mars that
the Roman husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and his
vines, his fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the priestly
college of the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to sacrifice for the
growth of the crops, addressed their petitions almost exclusively; and it
was to Mars, as we saw, that a horse was sacrificed in October to secure
an abundant harvest. Moreover, it was to Mars, under his title of "Mars of
the woods" (Mars Silvanus), that farmers offered sacrifice for the welfare of
their cattle. We have already seen that cattle are commonly supposed to
be under the special patronage of tree-gods. Once more, the consecration
of the vernal month of March to Mars seems to point him out as the deity of
the sprouting vegetation. Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old Mars
at the beginning of the new year in spring is identical with the Slavonic
custom of "carrying out Death," if the view here taken of the latter custom
is correct. The similarity of the Roman and Slavonic customs has been
already remarked by scholars, who appear, however, to have taken
Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding figures in the Slavonic
ceremonies to be representatives of the old year rather than of the old god
of vegetation. It is possible that ceremonies of this kind may have come to
be thus interpreted in later times even by the people who practised them.
But the personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be
primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic, ceremony, the
representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a deity
of vegetation but also as a scapegoat. His expulsion implies this; for there
is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such, should be expelled the
city. But it is otherwise if he is also a scapegoat; it then becomes
necessary to drive him beyond the boundaries, that he may carry his
sorrowful burden away to other lands. And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius
appears to have been driven away to the land of the Oscans, the enemies
of Rome. 1
Section 2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece.
THE ANCIENT Greeks were also familiar with the use of a human
scapegoat. In Plutarch's native town of Chaeronea a ceremony of this kind
was performed by the chief magistrate at the Town Hall, and by each
householder at his own home. It was called the "expulsion of hunger." A
slave was beaten with rods of the agnus castus, and turned out of doors
with the words, "Out with hunger, and in with wealth and health." When
Plutarch held the office of chief magistrate of his native town he performed
this ceremony at the Town Hall, and he has recorded the discussion to
which the custom afterwards gave rise. 1
But in civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker forms
than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious Plutarch presided.
Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek
colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to
offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the
public expense, being fed on choice and pure food. At the expiry of the
year he was dressed in sacred garments, decked with holy branches, and
led through the whole city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of
the people might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or
stoned to death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly
maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public
expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine,
befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats. One of the
victims was sacrificed for the men and the other for the women. The former
wore round his neck a string of black, the latter a string of white figs.
Sometimes, it seems, the victim slain on behalf of the women was a
woman. They were led about the city and then sacrificed, apparently by
being stoned to death outside the city. But such sacrifices were not
confined to extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that
every year, at the festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the
men and one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death.
The city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one
of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a
scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others; six days
before his execution he was excommunicated, "in order that he alone
might bear the sins of all the people." 2
From the Lover's Leap, a white bluff at the southern end of their island,
the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal into the sea as a
scapegoat. But to lighten his fall they fastened live birds and feathers to
him, and a flotilla of small boats waited below to catch him and convey him
beyond the boundary. Probably these humane precautions were a
mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the scapegoat into the sea to
drown. The Leucadian ceremony took place at the time of a sacrifice to
Apollo, who had a temple or sanctuary on the spot. Elsewhere it was
customary to cast a young man every year into the sea, with the prayer,
"Be thou our offscouring." This ceremony was supposed to rid the people
of the evils by which they were beset, or according to a somewhat
different interpretation it redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to
the sea-god. As practised by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century
before our era, the custom of the scapegoat was as follows. When a city
suffered from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or deformed
person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which afflicted the
community. He was brought to a suitable place, where dried figs, a barley
loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These he ate. Then he was
beaten seven times upon his genital organs with squills and branches of
the wild fig and other wild trees, while the flutes played a particular tune.
Afterwards he was burned on a pyre built of the wood of forest trees; and
his ashes were cast into the sea. A similar custom appears to have been
annually celebrated by the Asiatic Greeks at the harvest festival of the
Thargelia. 3
In the ritual just described the scourging of the victim with squills,
branches of the wild fig, and so forth, cannot have been intended to
aggravate his sufferings, otherwise any stick would have been good
enough to beat him with. The true meaning of this part of the ceremony has
been explained by W. Mannhardt. He points out that the ancients attributed
to squills a magical power of averting evil influences, and that accordingly
they hung them up at the doors of their houses and made use of them in
purificatory rites. Hence the Arcadian custom of whipping the image of Pan
with squills at a festival, or whenever the hunters returned empty-handed,
must have been meant, not to punish the god, but to purify him from the
harmful influences which were impeding him in the exercise of his divine
functions as a god who should supply the hunter with game. Similarly the
object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital organs with squills
and so on, must have been to release his reproductive energies from any
restraint or spell under which they might be laid by demoniacal or other
malignant agency; and as the Thargelia at which he was annually
sacrificed was an early harvest festival celebrated in May, we must
recognise in him a representative of the creative and fertilising god of
vegetation. The representative of the god was annually slain for the
purpose I have indicated, that of maintaining the divine life in perpetual
vigour, untainted by the weakness of age; and before he was put to death
it was not unnatural to stimulate his reproductive powers in order that these
might be transmitted in full activity to his successor, the new god or new
embodiment of the old god, who was doubtless supposed immediately to
take the place of the one slain. Similar reasoning would lead to a similar
treatment of the scapegoat on special occasions, such as drought or
famine. If the crops did not answer to the expectation of the husbandman,
this would be attributed to some failure in the generative powers of the god
whose function it was to produce the fruits of the earth. It might be thought
that he was under a spell or was growing old and feeble. Accordingly he
was slain in the person of his representative, with all the ceremonies
already described, in order that, born young again, he might infuse his
own youthful vigour into the stagnant energies of nature. On the same
principle we can understand why Mamurius Veturius was beaten with
rods, why the slave at the Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the
agnus castus (a tree to which magical properties were ascribed), why the
effigy of Death in some parts of Europe is assailed with sticks and stones,
and why at Babylon the criminal who played the god scourged before he
was crucified. The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the agony
of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any malignant
influences by which at the supreme moment he might conceivably be
beset. 4
Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia
represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been well
remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to have
masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He points out that the
process of caprification, as it is called, that is, the artificial fertilisation of
the cultivated fig-trees by hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs,
takes place in Greece and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date
of the Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white
figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom represented
the men and the other the women, may have been a direct imitation of the
process of caprification designed, on the principle of imitative magic, to
assist the fertilisation of the fig-trees. And since caprification is in fact a
marriage of the male fig-tree with the female fig-tree, Mr. Paton further
supposes that the loves of the trees may, on the same principle of imitative
magic, have been simulated by a mock or even a real marriage between
the two human victims, one of whom appears sometimes to have been a
woman. On this view the practice of beating the human victims on their
genitals with branches of wild fig-trees and with squills was a charm
intended to stimulate the generative powers of the man and woman who for
the time being personated the male and the female fig-trees respectively,
and who by their union in marriage, whether real or pretended, were
believed to help the trees to bear fruit. 5
The interpretation which I have adopted of the custom of beating the
human scapegoat with certain plants is supported by many analogies.
Thus among the Kai of German New Guinea, when a man wishes to make
his banana shoots bear fruit quickly, he beats them with a stick cut from a
banana-tree which has already borne fruit. Here it is obvious that
fruitfulness is believed to inhere in a stick cut from a fruitful tree and to be
imparted by contact to the young banana plants. Similarly in New
Caledonia a man will beat his taro plants lightly with a branch, saying as
he does so, "I beat this taro that it may grow," after which he plants the
branch in the ground at the end of the field. Among the Indians of Brazil at
the mouth of the Amazon, when a man wishes to increase the size of his
generative organ, he strikes it with the fruit of a white aquatic plant called
aninga, which grows luxuriantly on the banks of the river. The fruit, which
is inedible, resembles a banana, and is clearly chosen for this purpose on
account of its shape. The ceremony should be performed three days
before or after the new moon. In the county of Bekes, in Hungary, barren
women are fertilised by being struck with a stick which has first been used
to separate pairing dogs. Here a fertilising virtue is clearly supposed to be
inherent in the stick and to be conveyed by contact to the women. The
Toradjas of Central Celebes think that the plant Dracaena terminalis has a
strong soul, because when it is lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence
when a man is ill, his friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of the
head with Dracaena leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul with the
strong soul of the plant. 6
These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which, following
my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have given of the
beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek harvest festival of the
Thargelia. That beating, being administered to the generative organs of the
victims by fresh green plants and branches, is most naturally explained as
a charm to increase the reproductive energies of the men or women either
by communicating to them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by
ridding them of the maleficent influences; and this interpretation is
confirmed by the observation that the two victims represented the two
sexes, one of them standing for the men in general and the other for the
women. The season of the year when the ceremony was performed,
namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with the theory that the rite
had an agricultural significance. Further, that it was above all intended to
fertilise the fig-trees is strongly suggested by the strings of black and white
figs which were hung round the necks of the victims, as well as by the
blows which were given their genital organs with the branches of a wild
fig-tree; since this procedure closely resembles the procedure which
ancient and modern husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly resorted to
for the purpose of actually fertilising their fig-trees. When we remember
what an important part the artificial fertilisation of the date palm-tree
appears to have played of old not only in the husbandry but in the religion
of Mesopotamia, there seems no reason to doubt that the artificial
fertilisation of the fig-tree may in like manner have vindicated for itself a
place in the solemn ritual of Greek religion. 7
If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude that while
the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in later classical times
to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats, who carried away with them
the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of the whole people, at an earlier time
they may have been looked on as embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of
the corn but particularly of the fig-trees; and that the beating which they
received and the death which they died were intended primarily to brace
and refresh the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish
under the torrid heat of the Greek summer. 8
The view here taken of the Greek scapegoat, if it is correct, obviates an
objection which might otherwise be brought against the main argument of
this book. To the theory that the priest of Aricia was slain as a
representative of the spirit of the grove, it might have been objected that
such a custom has no analogy in classical antiquity. But reasons have
now been given for believing that the human being periodically and
occasionally slain by the Asiatic Greeks was regularly treated as an
embodiment of a divinity of vegetation. Probably the persons whom the
Athenians kept to be sacrificed were similarly treated as divine. That they
were social outcasts did not matter. On the primitive view a man is not
chosen to be the mouth-piece or embodiment of a god on account of his
high moral qualities or social rank. The divine afflatus descends equally on
the good and the bad, the lofty and the lowly. If then the civilised Greeks
of Asia and Athens habitually sacrificed men whom they regarded as
incarnate gods, there can be no inherent improbability in the supposition
that at the dawn of history a similar custom was observed by the
semibarbarous Latins in the Arician Grove. 9
But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove that the custom
of putting to death a human representative of a god was known and
practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the Arician Grove. This proof I
now propose to adduce. 10
Section 3. The Roman Saturnalia.
WE have seen that many peoples have been used to observe an annual
period of license, when the customary restraints of law and morality are
thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to
extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent
which would never be allowed them in the more staid and sober course of
ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of human nature, too
often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly
at the end of the year, and are frequently associated, as I have had
occasion to point out, with one or other of the agricultural seasons,
especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all these periods
of license the one which is best known and which in modern language has
given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This famous festival fell in
December, the last month of the Roman year, and was popularly supposed
to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing and of
husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and beneficent
king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on the mountains
together, taught them to till the ground, gave them laws, and ruled in
peace. His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth
abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no
baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and
contented peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown: all
men had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king,
vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines
were reared in his honour, and many hills and high places in Italy bore his
name. Yet the bright tradition of his reign was crossed by a dark shadow:
his altars are said to have been stained with the blood of human victims,
for whom a more merciful age afterwards substituted effigies. Of this gloomy
side of the god's religion there is little or no trace in the descriptions which
ancient writers have left us of the Saturnalia. Feasting and revelry and all
the mad pursuit of pleasure are the features that seem to have especially
marked this carnival of antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets
and public squares and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth to
the twenty-third of December. 1
But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it seems to
have struck the ancients themselves more than the license granted to
slaves at this time. The distinction between the free and the servile classes
was temporarily abolished. The slave might rail at his master, intoxicate
himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not even a word of
reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at any other
season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death.
Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited
on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the
board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this inversion of
ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in
which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave
their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed invested with all
the dignity of the consulship, the praetorship, and the bench. Like the pale
reflection of power thus accorded to bondsmen at the Saturnalia was the
mock kingship for which freemen cast lots at the same season. The person
on whom the lot fell enjoyed the title of king, and issued commands of a
playful and ludicrous nature to his temporary subjects. One of them he
might order to mix the wine, another to drink, another to sing, another to
dance, another to speak in his own dispraise, another to carry a flute-girl
on his back round the house. 2
Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this festive
season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of society in Saturn's
time, and that in general the Saturnalia passed for nothing more or less
than a temporary revival or restoration of the reign of that merry monarch,
we are tempted to surmise that the mock king who presided over the revels
may have originally represented Saturn himself. The conjecture is strongly
confirmed, if not established, by a very curious and interesting account of
the way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by the Roman soldiers
stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and Diocletian. The
account is preserved in a narrative of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, which
was unearthed from a Greek manuscript in the Paris library, and published
by Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer descriptions of the event
and of the custom are contained in manuscripts at Milan and Berlin; one of
them had already seen the light in an obscure volume printed at Urbino in
1727, but its importance for the history of the Roman religion, both ancient
and modern, appears to have been overlooked until Professor Cumont
drew the attention of scholars to all three narratives by publishing them
together some years ago. According to these narratives, which have all
the appearance of being authentic, and of which the longest is probably
based on official documents, the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower
Moesia celebrated the Saturnalia year by year in the following manner.
Thirty days before the festival they chose by lot from amongst themselves
a young and handsome man, who was then clothed in royal attire to
resemble Saturn. Thus arrayed and attended by a multitude of soldiers he
went about in public with full license to indulge his passions and to taste of
every pleasure, however base and shameful. But if his reign was merry, it
was short and ended tragically; for when the thirty days were up and the
festival of Saturn had come, he cut his own throat on the altar of the god
whom he personated. In the year A.D. 303 the lot fell upon the Christian
soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the heathen god and soil
his last days by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his
commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly
he was beheaded, as the Christian martyrologist records with minute
accuracy, at Durostorum by the soldier John on Friday the twentieth day
of November, being the twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the fourth
hour. 3
Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its historical
character, which had been doubted or denied, has received strong
confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of the cathedral
which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is preserved, among other
remarkable antiquities, a white marble sarcophagus bearing a Greek
inscription, in characters of the age of Justinian, to the following effect:
"Here lies the holy martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum." The
sarcophagus was transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the
church of San Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from a
Latin inscription let into the masonry, the martyr's bones still repose with
those of two other saints. How long the sarcophagus was deposited in the
church of San Pellegrino, we do not know; but it is recorded to have been
there in the year 1650. We may suppose that the saint's relics were
transferred for safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries
which followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged
by successive hordes of barbarian invaders. At all events it appears
certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of the
martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a
real man, who suffered death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the early
centuries of the Christian era. Finding the narrative of the nameless
martyrologist thus established as to the principal fact recorded, namely, the
martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his testimony as to the
manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more because his narrative is
precise, circumstantial, and entirely free from the miraculous element.
Accordingly I conclude that the account which he gives of the celebration
of the Saturnalia among the Roman soldiers is trustworthy. 4
This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King of the
Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the winter
revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus. It seems to prove that his
business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew
whose only care was that the revelry should run high and the fun grow fast
and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the
streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far
away to the north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare
this comic monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim
counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the
long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other ages and in
other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in sceptred palls, have
played their little pranks for a few brief hours or days, then passed before
their time to a violent death, we can hardly doubt that in the King of the
Saturnalia at Rome, as he is depicted by classical writers, we see only a
feeble emasculated copy of that original, whose strong features have been
fortunately preserved for us by the obscure author of the Martyrdom of St.
Dasius. In other words, the martyrologist's account of the Saturnalia agrees
so closely with the accounts of similar rites elsewhere which could not
possibly have been known to him, that the substantial accuracy of his
description may be regarded as established; and further, since the custom
of putting a mock king to death as a representative of a god cannot have
grown out of a practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel,
whereas the reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in
assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the universal
practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to
choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary
privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died, whether by his own or
another's hand, whether by the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in
the character of the good god who gave his life for the world. In Rome
itself and other great towns the growth of civilisation had probably
mitigated this cruel custom long before the Augustan age, and transformed
it into the innocent shape it wears in the writings of the few classical
writers who bestow a passing notice on the holiday King of the Saturnalia.
But in remoter districts the older and sterner practice may long have
survived; and even if after the unification of Italy the barbarous usage was
suppressed by the Roman government, the memory of it would be handed
down by the peasants and would tend from time to time, as still happens
with the lowest forms of superstition among ourselves, to lead to a
recrudescence of the practice, especially among the rude soldiery on the
outskirts of the empire over whom the once iron hand of Rome was
beginning to relax its grasp. 5
The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the Carnival of
modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts that
have come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not
amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is,
in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most
lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure
personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and
dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned
grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the
Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct
successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the
real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered
a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth
Night and the mediaeval Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or Lord of
Misrule are figures of the same sort and may perhaps have had a similar
origin. Whether that was so or not, we may conclude with a fair degree of
probability that if the King of the Wood at Aricia lived and died as an
incarnation of a sylvan deity, he had of old a parallel at Rome in the men
who, year by year, were slain in the character of King Saturn, the god of
the sown and sprouting seed. 6
