The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer.pdf

The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer

Author(s): W. Warde Fowler

Reviewed work(s):

Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 1 (1911), pp. 57-63

Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/295848 .

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THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE WORD SACER.

By W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.

In Roman religious law the word sacer indicated that the object

to which it was applied was the property of a deity, taken out of the

region of the prolanum by the action of the state, and passed on

into that of the sacrum. We have an exact account of it which

can be traced through Verrius Flaccus to a scholar apparently of

the age of Cicero, Aelius Gallus. " Gallus Aelius ait sacrum esse,

quodcunque more1 atque instituto civitatis consecratum sit, sive

aedis sive ara sive signum sive pecunia sive quid aliud quod dis

dedicatum atque consecratum sit: quod autem privati suae religionis

causa aliquid earum rerum deo dedicent, id pontifices Romanos

non existimare sacrum." 2 This very explicit passage makes it

plain that the state, through its religious authorities, had appro-

priated the word, and fixed it to a definite meaning, at some period

when there were alreadv temples in which deities could dwell and

enjoy the possession of their own property, made over to them by

the state to do them honour and propitiate them.

But this highly developed idea of deities dwelling in fixed spots

in the city, and holding property, is at Rome a comparatively late

one. The earliest document of the ius divinum, the so-called

calendar of Numa, can be placed with confidence in the regal period,

between the inclusion of the Quirinal in the city of the four regions

and the building of the temple of Diana on the Aventine ; 3 and

this temple of Diana, and that of the Capitoline trias which belongs

to the same age, are the first two temples in the proper sense of

the word, and the earliest in which any kind of statue is known to

have been placed. Before that the lanuml was a small open en-

closure with a rude ara, probably of turf, and nothing more.4 The

word sacer mnusthave developed its later technical meaning in and

after this period. Is it possible to discover with any approach to

certainty what meaning it had in still earlier times ? We might

naturally look for a meaning of the same general type, but less

accurately defined, and so to speak, less theological. For until

deities or spirits come to be localised in particular spots and to have

special priests attached to them, the vocabulary of worship must be

necessarily less clearly cut than in an age when that worship was

becoming the most important part of the state's " cura."

I This

3 See Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer, 27.

4 Marquardt, op. cit. I6I,

Lachmann's

correction

for

MS.

ff. Wissowa, op. cit.

"quocunque

modo."

See

Marquardt, Staatsver-

waltung, iii, 145.

2 Festus, p. 321.

400, ff.

Cf. Gaius, ii, 5.

THE ORIGINAL

MEANING

OF THE WORD SACER.

Perhaps this earlier meaning of sacer is indicated in a curious

passage of Macrobius, who wrote it with a book before him De

religionibus,by Trebatius Testa, the friend of Cicero. "Hoc loco

non alienum videtur de condicione eorum hominum referre quos

leges sacrosesse certis dis iubent, quia non ignoro quibusdammirum

videri quod, cum cetera sacraviolari nefas sit, hominem sacrumius

fuerit occidi."' 1 The explanationthat follows is of no value to us;

but the fact that some Romanswere puzzled by the impunity of the

slayer of the sacer homois one of the utmost interest. They were

puzzled,becausethey hadalwaysunderstoodthe wordsacerin the sense

in which it was defined by Aelius Gallus. A thing that was sacrum

was knownby all to be the propertyof a deity, and to violate it was,

nelas, a deadiv crimne. Yet here was an object called by this solemn

adjective, homosacer, which might be violated without any nelas:

a man whom anyone might slay with impunity.

Evidently sacerwas used here in an exceptionalsense, and surely

in a very ancient sense; for no one will deny that the hormo

saceris

a survivalfrom a primitive age into one of highly developed civil

and religiouslaw. Sacerestois in fact a curse; and the homosacer

on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed,

dangerous. We may compare him with the primitive Semitic

outcast describedby RobertsonSmith in an appendixto his Religion

of the Semites.

2 He has been showing that the " holy " thing is

not originallysomethingmade the propertyof a god, but something

simply tabooed for whatever reason,without reference to gods or

spirits. Then he goes on: " Closely allied to this curse is the ban

by which impious sinners or enemies . . . were devoted. The

ban is a form of devotion to the deity, and to ban is in the O.T.

sometimesrendered ' consecrate.' " So too the homosacer,we may

suppose, was cursed and consecratedat the same moment. He is

thereforesacer,not in the sense appropriatedby the framersof the

ius divinum,of things made over to a deity in order to please and

glorify him, but in the more primitive sense of " accursedand left

to a deity to avenge himself on if he be so pleased." And as he

was not in any true sense the propertyof the god, or valued bv him

as such, like objects called sacra under the religious law, anyone

putting him to death would not be committing wvhatwas ne/as.

In no sense whatevercould he be thought of as a sacrificial victim;

if he had been such, it would certainly have been nelas for anyone

I Macrob. Sat. iii, 7, 3. The explanation is a

curious example of the semi-mystical tendency of

Trebatius' time. The souls of homines sacrati were

dis debitae, and might therefore be sent ad caelum

as soon as possible, i.e. by anyone who had the

chance.

2 P.

sacer in all its senses. Of course that which is the

property of a god can be called taboo as much as

the accursed man ; but in that sense it is a survival

from an older age into the religious law of a theo-

logical one. Mr. Marett tells me, what is very

interesting in this connexion, that taboo tends in

the Pacific to connote

Mr. Marett,

Threshold of Religion,

" prohibited by religious

434.

compares sacer and taboo, but is thinking of

law."

Iz6,

THE

WORD

SACER.

THE

ORIGINAL

MEANING

but a magistrateor priest,or the authorisedassistantof such officials,

to lay hands on him. Let us pursuethis point a little further.

In the ritual of sacrifice at the altar under the ius divinum,the

victim must be whollv acceptable to the deity ; it must be pure

and perfect, and its passageout of the region of the profanum

into

that of the sacrumis only consummatedwhen it has been slain, and

its entrails examined to see whether they show anyflaw that might

make it an undesirablegift to the god.1 The sacer honao,on the

other hand, was made or declared sacer by the comnmunityor its

authorities,2 and his slaughter, in whatever way it might ensue,

would not seem to have anything to do. with its passagefrom the

prolfanum

to the sacrum. Again, all sacrifice at the altar was

accompaniedwith prayer,as Pliny expresslytells us (N.H. xxviii, io),

and the languageof the oldest prayersmakesit clear that the deitvy

was believed to be glorified or strengthened by the process (e.g.

macte his suovetaurilibusesto) ; 3 but in the case of the homo sacer

such an idea is unthinkable. Whoever in short will go carefully

through the altar ritual will see that it is in everv point wholly

inapplicableto the homosacer. This will explain a passage of Festus

which seems to have puzzled the lawyers. " Sacer homo is est

quem populusiudicavit ob maleficium: neque/as est eumimmolari,

sed qui occidit parricidiinon damnatur." Here Festus, or rather

Verrius Flaccus, seems to me simply to mean, " in this case there

is no question of altar sacrifice, though the word sacer might lead

one to fancy so: anyone may kill the sacer homo." So Lactantius,

with Varro before him, writing of the Argei, who were supposed

to have been at one time human victims, says, " non quidem ut

homo ad aram immnolaretur,

sed uti in Tiberim de ponte Milvio

mitteretur."

And indeed there is no record of a homosacerbeing slain at the

altar, or slainwith the axe at all. The sheddingof his blood, for

whatever reason, seems to be carefullyavoided. The harvest thief

is hung; the man who had sufferedsacratiocapitis et bonorum

historical times might be thrown from the Tarpeian rock; the

parricide,who must have been sacer, though we are not expressly

told that he was, sufferedthe horrible penaltylof the sackand was

thrown into the sea.5 So too the guilty vestal was buried alive.

The only case of a human victim being, slaughtered at an altar

3 Cf. the prayers in Cato, De re rust. i32,

' This is, I think, the right way to look on the

process of sacrificium. The preliminary steps, e.g.

the pouring on the victim of molasalsa and libations

of wine, are only consummated by the actual

slaughter, and that again might fail to put the

victim into the region of the sacrum, if its exta

were not found perfect. (This is the only object

of examining the organs in genuine old Roman

ritual.)

2 See below at the end of this paper.

134,

139, 141.

4 Festus, s.v. sacer homo. Lactantius, Inst. i,

21. Wissowa (op. cit. 326, note 4), has seen that

the ho7nosacer cannot be the subject of a sacri-

ficium " der mit Strafschuld beladene Verbrecher

konnte ebensowenig als eine Ehrung den Gottern

dargebracht werden, wie die Missgeburt, die man

stillschweigend beseitigt."

3 Cic. Pro. Rosc. Amer. 26, 72.

THE

ORIGINAL

MEANING

THE

WORD

SACER.

is that of the two mutinous soldiers,if such they were, who were

beheaded at the Ara Martis in the Campus Martiusby JuliusCaesar,

and their heads fixed up on the Regia :1 a strange ritual which

is so closely analogousto that of the yearly sacrificeof the October

horse that we must suppose it to have been a somewhat wanton

imitation of that rite. Lastly, in the case of the ver sacrum,though

the animalswere believed to have been sacrificedat the altar, the

human beings were kept till they were grown up and then driven

beyond the frontier.

So far then the distinction between the homosacer and a sacri-

ficial victim seemsclear. But here we meet with a difficulty in our

argument. When we examine the records of the ancient rules of

law relating to the homo sacer, we find that in most instanceshe is

placedin connexionwith a deity or deities to whomhe might seemto

be " sacrificed." Not indeed in every case: Festus, s.v. Terminus,

tells us that Numa Pompilius" statuit eum, qui terminumexarasset,

et ipsum et boves sacros esse" without any reference to a deity

Terminus. So too in the XII tables: " Patronussi clienti fraudem

fecerit sacer esto;" where it is only from a Greek writer that we

learn that the man was to be sacer " to " the infernalJupiter, i.e.

apparently Vediovis. 2 But of the harvest thief it is said that

"4 suspensumCererinecari iubebant: "3 though it is to be noticed

that the word sacer is not here used. The husband who sold his

wife was to be sacrificed(if we may so translatePlutarch's OviEOal)

to the infernaldeities 4 and of the son who struckhis father it was

written, " divis parentum sacer estod." 5

Here let us notice that with the exception of Ceres, it is the di

inlenr who are mentioned; and even Ceres may reasonably be

supposed to have been in this context originally Tellus Mater, whose

place she frequently usurped in historical times. 6 Now these are

the deities of the devotio: Decius for example, after having been

made sacer under the directions of the pontifex7 (so the process

may be explained) and having invoked all the gods of Rome to help

the state, finished with the words " ita pro re publica Quiritium,

exercitu legionibus auxiliis populi Romani Quiritium legiones

auxiliaque hostium mecum dis Manibus Tellurique devoveo." 8

Evidently there is some analogy or close connexion between the

devotio and the consecratio of the sacer homo: and as the self-

immolating victim of the devotio was a kind of vicarious sacrifice for

1 Dio Cassius, xliii, z4. Mommsen, Straf-

recht, 9I3 ; Wissowa, op. cit. 355, note 3, considers

it an undoubted case of imitation of an ancient

rite. See also my Roman Festivals, 249, note 2.

2 Serv. Aen. 6, 609:

6 Wissowa, op. cit. i6i.

I Livy, viii, 9, 6-8: and cf. the explanations of

the ritual by Prof. Deubner in Archiv. fur Religions-

wissenschaft, I905, 69, ff.

8 In a later formula quoted by Macrobius (iii,

9, io) as used at the siege of Carthage, the deities

are Dis Pater, Vediovis, Manes.

cf. Dion. Hal. ii, 74.

3 Plin. xviii, 8, 12.

4 Plut. Rom. 22.

? Festus, 230.

Dis Pater is the

Greek name for Orcus.

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