Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (review)

Jerzy Linderski

American Journal of Philology, Volume 129, Number 1 (Whole Number513), Spring 2008, pp. 125-128 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ajp.2008.0013

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book reviews

uRogeR D. WooDaRD. Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult.

Traditions. Urbana: University of illinois Press, 2006. xiv + 296 pp. Cloth, $50.

in all cultures gods claim possessions on earth. Two divine realms stand out: time and space. A perceptive scholar aptly described the religious feasts, in rome the feriae and dies festi, as “temporal possession of gods” (Jörg rüpke, Kalender und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentation und religiösen Qualifikation von Zeit in Rom [berlin: de Gruyter, 1995], 492). Divine space manifested itself in rome in two distinct forms: there were places (loca) that were sacred (sacra), places that were holy (sancta), and places that were both sacred and holy (on this distinction, see more below). roman cult of the period illuminated by literature and monuments was a confluence of indo-european inheritance, etruscan and Greek elements, and home-grown italic, Latin, and roman innovations. The indian component of the indo-european tradition has been brought into prominence by the voluminous publications of Georges Dumézil and his theory of the tri-functional Proto-indo-european society: the three spheres were those of worship and legal writ, war, and work, with the classes of priests/governors, warriors, and producers and with the corresponding patron deities. in india we have Mitra and varuna, indra, and the As;vins and the castes of bra\hman≥a, ks≥atriya, and ways ;ya. Georges Dumézil demonstrated great ingenuity in applying this indian scheme to rome; see especially his summa, Archaic Roman Religion (english trans.: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). This theory has captivated many, especially among the linguists and popularizers; woodard is its ardent supporter. students of roman history and religion following the lead of Arnaldo Momigliano (and the indologist Jan Gonda) have been generally cautious; see recently Mary beard, John North, and simon Price, Religions of Rome I: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14–16: while granting that “Dumézil’s work has prompted much useful discussion about individual festivals or areas of wor-ship in rome,” they do not find any compelling evidence for his overarching scheme and observe that all this “theorizing shows us once more how powerful in accounts of early roman religion is the mystique of origins and schemata” (cf. in a similar vein, but concerning archaic rome in general and in particular the views of kurt Latte, Jerzy Linderski, Roman Questions II [stuttgart: steiner, 2007], 31–33, 595–96).

woodard has made his name with studies in Greek and indo-european linguistics; his previous forays into the realm of roman religion were the notes to the Penguin translation of ovid’s Fasti (2000) and a piece on “The Disruption

American Journal of Philology 129 (2008) 125–140 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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of Time in Myth and epic” (Arethusa 35 [2002]: 83–98). The current book is to a great extent a measured polemic against skeptics and unbelievers, but woodard’s ultimate goal is more ambitious: his objective is not only to present a clear sum-mary of Dumézil’s arguments but also “to jump forward from that Dumézilian platform and to offer a new understanding of roman and . . . primitive indo-european religious structures and phenomena,” an understanding which “differs appreciably from Dumézil’s own interpretations” (ix). The book consists of five chapters. Here is a synopsis:

i. “The Minor Capitoline Triad” (1–58). in the Capitoline temple built by Tarquinius superbus, the reigning triad was that of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Now there were in rome fifteen priests called flamines, three of whom were Maiores: the priests of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—Flamen Dialis, Martialis, and Quirinalis. That here we have before us another, earlier triad was already recognized by Georg wissowa (Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2d ed. [Munich: C.H. beck, 1912], 154); for Dumézil and woodard this is the prime exhibit of the original trifunctional scheme of law and religion, war, and production/fecundity. but woodard discovers still another minor triad. before Jupiter’s temple was built, various deities had inhabited the hill. Two of them, Juventas and Terminus, despite all the religious ceremonies and entreaties, refused to relocate, and thus their sacella had to be incorporated into the Capitoline temple.

ii. “Terminus” (59–95). in this triad, Juventas represents warlike youth, but Terminus causes trouble. Dumézil regarded the god of boundaries as aligned with the first function. woodard points out that varro (Ling. Lat. 5.74) lists Terminus among the gods to whom the sabine king Titus Tatius dedicated altars, and, as activities of Tatius are associated with the third function, here will also belong gods he worshipped. for Terminus, proof is to be found again in india, in the yu\pa, the post marking the eastern boundary of the extended sacrificial space. behind both markers “lies a common indo-european cultic antecedent intimately linked to the realm of productivity and fecundity” (81).

iii. “into the Teacup” (96–141). Under this enigmatic title (it refers to a modern debate [130]), the chapter deals with the boundaries of the urbs and ager, the rituals of lustration, and the two akin but distinct (so woodard) ceremonies, the Ambarvalia (conducted by the pontiffs) and the rites in the grove of Dea Dia (conducted by the Arval brethren).

iv. “The fourth fire” (142–240). The three fires in rome corresponding to the three ritual vedic fires (as postulated by Dumézil) are the fire at the circular aedes of vesta, the sacrificial fires on the altars at the quadrangular temples, and the flame at the temple of volcanus (outside the city walls). in the veda, the fourth fire for the rituals of the holy drink soma is placed in the eastern extension of the sacrificial space (Mahãdevi). This extension, woodard argues, corresponds to the ager Romanus, and the rituals of the soma find their roman counterpart in the Arval rituals for the Dea Dia.

v. “from the inside out” (241–67). As indra was closely associated with yu\pa, so was Mars with Terminus. from this association stems the role of Mars

127book reviews

as the protector of fields against all foes and natural disasters (clearly visible in the Carmen arvale and the prayer preserved by Cato) and thus, ultimately, as the bringer (or perhaps rather “enabler”) of fecundity.

This brief account cannot do justice to the seductive power of the book, where dazzling juxtapositions conjure up edifices of argument, and minute details open broad vistas. The masterful disproval of the oddly popular thesis of the agrarian Mars (232–40, 264–65) will bring intellectual joy to many. but even in this recovered realm of gods there is space and time for the voice of reflection. To a student of roman religion the book may seem to have a hole in its middle: it does not analyze the specifically roman concepts of space—there is no word of sacrum (places consecrated by the magistrates and pontiffs) and sanctum (places inaugurated by the augurs at the behest of magistrates cum imperio). The latter were called technically templa; the term also denoted the space carved in the air for the observation of the flight of birds. in his short discussion of templum (140, 243–44), woodard disappointingly disregards most modern studies dealing with the augurs, auguria and auspicia, and the ritual orientation (and in particular the inscribed stones from bantia marking an augural templum); see most recently (with ample bibliography) J. vaahtera, Roman Augural Lore in Greek Historiography (stuttgart: steiner, 2001), and Jerzy Linderski, Roman Questions II, 3–19.

Then there is the perennial question of method. it was the juxtaposition of brahman and flamen, we remember, that led Dumézil in 1935 onto his path of discovery. woodard admits that “flamen is not strictly a linguistic cognate of brahman,” but he still claims that “the two priests . . . likely have a common his-torical antecedent” (7, n. 10). And so it goes for other claims. each supposition might be right, but almost all involve some special pleading, and thus, statistically, their combined reliability must be low. varro’s list of “the gods of Titus Tatius” includes also summanus, a hypostasis of Jupiter, sol, and vertumnus (whom varro in another place [5.46] describes as “deus etruriae princeps”), deities that may well be associated with the first function. woodard does not mention them and refers (5) only to Dumézil’s aside that this list is “composite” and “in part anachronistic” (on this list, see Jean Collart, Varron: De Lingua Latina, Livre V [Paris: Les belles lettres, 1954], 172–73, 189–92). we can arrange varro’s list and all our data to fit the trifunctional theory, but to a cool-headed observer this procedure may appear perilously close to a petitio principii.

The method of Dumézil and woodard is that of comparative linguistics. it has been an epochal achievement to work out the family relationships of indo-european languages and proceed to (various) reconstructions of the common ancestor. but that language is entirely made up of words with asterisks: they are all hypothetical. This is even truer of the syntax, not to speak of the word usage. The statistical chance of arriving at the language that was actually spoken is nil. This did not scare off a German linguist from composing (exempli gratia) short Erzählungen in indo-european. The discovery of Hittite and the development of laryngeal theory rendered that particular version of the original language doubly non-existent. As a young student i enjoyed reading those stories in the

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Ursprache, and i have also been thrilled by Dumézil and variously instructed by him and now by woodard. Their method offers welcome glimpses into the cultic and social mist of time. but when they attempt to write a coherent narrative, their effort is akin to crafting tales in a hypothetical language on the basis of words with asterisks.

JeRzy LinDeRskiUniveRsity of noRth CaRoLina, ChapeL hiLL

e-mail: jlinders@email.unc.edu

aLfReD stüCkeLbeRgeR and geRD gRasshoff, eds. Klaudios Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie, Griechisch-Deutsch. vol. 1: einleitung und buch 1–4. vol. 2. buch 5–8 und indices. with contributions from florian Mitten-huber, renate burri, klaus Geus, Gerhard winkler, susanne Ziegler, Judith Hindermann, Lutz koch, and kurt keller. basel: schwabe verlag, 2006. 1018 pp. 24 color and black-and-white ills. 29 maps. 1 CD-roM. Cloth, €170.

Ptolemy’s Geography is at the same time the only survivor of the ancient Greek literature devoted to the topic of drawing maps of the world and is the most extensive ancient list that we possess of names and locations of communi-ties and physical features in the known parts of europe, Africa, and Asia. it may seem astonishing that a document of exceptional importance for ancient history, geography, and the history of science should have had to wait until now for a complete critical edition. in fact the last complete edition, by C. f. A. Nobbe (1843–45), presents an indiscriminate text with no apparatus beyond a skimpy eighteen-page “index Criticus” at the end. Two other editions, by f. w. wilberg and C. H. f. Grashof (1838–45) and by C. Müller and C. T. fischer (1883–1901), though furnished with apparatus, were vitiated by defective knowledge of the main lines of the textual tradition and besides were never completed. The twentieth century saw major progress in the sorting out of the Geography’s manuscripts, with important contributions by (among others) Joseph fischer, otto Cuntz, Aubrey Diller, and above all by Paul schnabel, whose monograph on the subject was meant as a mere harbinger of an edition that he did not live to produce. Meanwhile, scholars in need of a reliable text have had to make do with a patchwork of intentionally partial editions limited to sections of Ptolemy’s geographical catalogue covering specific regions.

The biggest obstacle in the way of restoring the Geography arises from one of Ptolemy’s profoundest insights, that a graphical object such as a world map can be reproduced more accurately if its contents are translated into a collection of numerical coordinates representing each significant point of the drawing, in effect, a digitization. About two thirds of the Geography is thus dedicated to a list of some eight-thousand place names with the longitudes and latitudes of the corresponding localities expressed in degrees and fractions of a degree, ordered