James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)

Plague nailed down in ancient Rome.

The simple ceremony, in which to this day the superstition of European peasants sees a sovereign remedy for plague and fever and toothache, has come down to us from a remote antiquity; for in days when as yet Paris and London were not, when France still revered the Druids as the masters of all knowledge, human and divine, and when our own country was still covered with virgin forests, the home of savage beasts and savage men, the same ceremony was solemnly performed from time to time by the highest magistrate at Rome, to stay the ravages of pestilence or retrieve disaster that threatened the foundations of the national life. In the fourth century before our era the city of Rome was desolated by a great plague which raged for three years, carrying off some of the highest dignitaries and a great multitude of common folk. The historian who records the calamity informs us that when a banquet had been offered to the gods in vain, and neither human counsels nor divine help availed to mitigate the violence of the disease, it was resolved for the first time in Roman history to institute dramatical performances as an appropriate means of appeasing the wrath of the celestial powers. Accordingly actors were fetched from Etruria, who danced certain simple and decorous dances to the music of a flute. But even this novel spectacle failed to amuse or touch, to move to tears or laughter the sullen gods. The plague still raged, and at the very moment when the actors were playing their best in the circus beside the Tiber, the yellow river rose in angry flood and drove players and spectators, wading and splashing through the fast-deepening waters, away from the show. It was clear that the gods spurned plays as well as prayers and banquets; and in the general consternation it was felt that some more effectual measure should be taken to put an end to the scourge. Old men remembered that a plague had once been stayed by the knocking of a nail into a wall; and accordingly the Senate resolved that now in their extremity, when all other means had failed, a supreme magistrate should be appointed for the sole purpose of performing this solemn ceremony. The appointment was made, the nail was knocked, and the plague ceased, sooner or later. 226 226 Livy, vii. 1-3. The plague raged from 365 to 363 b. c., when it was happily stayed in the manner described in the text. What better proof could be given of the saving virtue of a nail?

Pestilence and civil discord nailed into a wall in Rome.

Twice more within the same century the Roman people had recourse to the same venerable ceremony as a cure for public calamities with which the ordinary remedies, civil and religious, seemed unable to cope. One of these occasions was a pestilence; 227 227 Livy, ix. 28. This happened in the year 313 b. c. the other was a strange mortality among the leading men, which public opinion traced, rightly or wrongly, to a series of nefarious crimes perpetrated by noble matrons, who took their husbands off by poison. The crimes, real or imaginary, were set down to frenzy, and nothing could be thought of so likely to minister to minds diseased as the knocking of a nail into a wall. Search among the annals of the city proved that in a season of civil discord, when the state had been rent by party feud, the same time-honoured remedy, the same soothing balm, had been applied with the happiest results to the jarring interests and heated passions of the disputants. Accordingly the old nostrum was tried once more, and again success appeared to justify the experiment. 228 228 Livy, viii. 18. These events took place in 331 b. c.

The annual ceremony of knocking in a nail at Rome.

If the Romans in the fourth century before Christ thus deemed it possible to rid themselves of pestilence, frenzy, and sedition by hammering them into a wall, even as French and German peasants still rid themselves of fever and toothache by knocking them into a tree, their prudent ancestors appear to have determined that so salutary a measure should not be restricted in its scope to meeting special and urgent emergencies as they arose, but should regularly diffuse its benefits over the community by anticipating and, as it were, nipping in the bud evils which, left unchecked, might grow to dangerous proportions. This, we may conjecture, was the original intention of an ancient Roman law which ordained that the highest magistrate of the republic should knock in a nail every year on the thirteenth day of September. The law might be seen, couched in old-fashioned language, engraved on a tablet which was fastened to a wall of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter; and although the place where the nails were driven in is nowhere definitely stated by classical writers, there are some grounds for thinking that it may have been the same wall on which the law that sanctioned the custom was exhibited. Livy tells us that the duty of affixing the nail, at one time discharged by the consuls, was afterwards committed to dictators, whose higher rank consorted better with the dignity and importance of the function. At a later time the custom fell into abeyance, and the ancient ceremony was revived only from time to time in seasons of grave peril or extraordinary calamity, which seemed to attest the displeasure of the gods at modern ways, and disposed men to bethink them of ancestral lore and to walk in the old paths. 229 229 Livy, vii. 3. Livy says nothing as to the place where the nails were affixed; but from Festus (p. 56 ed. C. O. Müller) we learn that it was the wall of a temple, and as the date of the ceremony was also the date of the dedication of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol (Plutarch, Publicola , 14), we may fairly conjecture that this temple was the scene of the rite. It is the more necessary to call attention to the uncertainty which exists on this point because modern writers, perhaps misunderstanding the words of Livy, have commonly stated as a fact what is at best only a more or less probable hypothesis. Octavian seems to have provided for the knocking of a nail into the temple of Mars by men who had held the office of censor. See Dio Cassius, lv. 10, ἧλόν τε αὐτῷ ὑπὸ τῶν τιμητευσάντων προσπήγνυσθαι.

The ceremony was probably a purificatory rite designed to disarm and disable all evils that might threaten the Roman state in the course of the year. Roman cure for epilepsy.

In antiquity the annual practice of hammering a nail into a wall was not confined to Rome. It was observed also at Vulsinii, in Etruria, where the nails thus fixed in the temple of the goddess Nortia served as a convenient means of recording and numbering the years. 230 230 Livy, vii. 3. Festus speaks (p. 56 ed. C. O. Müller) of “the annual nail, which was fixed in the walls of temples for the purpose of numbering the years,” as if the practice were common. From Cicero's passing reference to the custom (“ Ex hoc die clavum anni movebis ,” Epist. ad Atticum , v. 15. 1) we see that it was matter of notoriety. Hence we may safely reject Mommsen's theory, which Mr. W. Warde Fowler is disposed to accept ( The Roman Festivals of the period of the Republic , London, 1899, pp. 234 sq. ), that the supposed annual custom never existed except in the brains of Roman Dryasdusts. To Roman antiquaries of a later period it seemed, naturally enough, that such a practice had indeed no other object than that of marking the flight of time in ages when writing was but little used. 231 231 See Livy and Festus, ll.cc. Yet a little reflection will probably convince us that this, though it was doubtless a useful consequence of the custom, can hardly have been its original intention. For it will scarcely be disputed that the annual observance of the custom cannot be wholly dissociated from its occasional observance in seasons of great danger or calamity, and that whatever explanation we give of the one ought to apply to the other also. Now it is plain that if we start from the annual observance and regard it as no more than a timekeeper or mode of recording the years, we shall never reach an adequate explanation of the occasional observance. If the nails were merely ready reckoners of the years, how could they come to be used as supreme remedies for pestilence, frenzy, and sedition, resorted to by the state in desperate emergencies when all the ordinary resources of policy and religion had failed? On the other hand, if we start from the occasional observance and view it, in accordance with modern analogies, as a rude attempt to dispose of intangible evils as if they were things that could be handled and put away out of sight, we can readily understand how such an attempt, from being made occasionally, might come to be repeated annually for the sake of wiping out all the old troubles and misfortunes of the past year and enabling the community to start afresh, unencumbered by a fardel of ills, at the beginning of a new year. Fortunately we can shew that the analogy which is thus assumed to exist between the Roman custom and modern superstition is not a merely fanciful one; in other words, it can be proved that the Romans, like modern clowns, did believe in the possibility of nailing down trouble, in a literal and physical sense, into a material substance. Pliny tells us that an alleged cure for epilepsy, or the falling sickness, was to drive an iron nail into the ground on the spot which was first struck by the patient's head as he fell. 232 232 Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxviii. 63. In the light of the modern instances which have come before us, we can hardly doubt that the cure was supposed to consist in actually nailing the disease into the earth in such a way that it could not get up and attack the sufferer again. Precisely parallel is a Suffolk cure for ague. You must go by night alone to a cross-road, and just as the clock strikes the midnight hour you must turn yourself about thrice and drive a tenpenny nail up to the head into the ground. Then walk away backwards from the spot before the clock is done striking twelve, and you will miss the ague; but the next person who passes over the nail will catch the malady in your stead. 233 233 County Folk-lore, Suffolk , edited by Lady E. C. Gurdon (London, 1893), p. 14. In the north-west Highlands of Scotland it used to be customary to bury a black cock alive on the spot where an epileptic patient fell down. Along with the cock were buried parings of the patient's nails and a lock of his hair. See (Sir) Arthur Mitchell, On various Superstitions in the North-West Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1862), p. 26; J. G. Campbell, Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Glasgow, 1902), p. 97. Probably the disease was supposed to be buried with the cock in the ground. The ancient Hindoos imagined that epilepsy was caused by a dog-demon. When a boy fell down in a fit, his father or other competent person used to wrap the sufferer in a net, and carry him into the hall, not through the door, but through an opening made for the purpose in the roof. Then taking up some earth in the middle of the hall, at the place where people gambled, he sprinkled the spot with water, cast dice on it, and laid the boy on his back on the dice. After that he prayed to the dog-demon, saying, “Doggy, let him loose! Reverence be to thee, barker, bender! Doggy, let him loose! Reverence be to thee, barker, bender!” See The Grihya Sutras , translated by H. Oldenberg, Part i. (Oxford, 1886) pp. 296 sq. ; id. Part ii. (Oxford, 1892) pp. 219 sq. , 286 sq. ( Sacred Books of the East , vols. xxix. and xxx.). Apparently the place where people gambled was for some reason supposed to be a spot where an epileptic could divest himself most readily of his malady. But the connexion of thought is obscure. Here it is plainly assumed that the ague of which the patient is relieved has been left by him nailed down into the earth at the cross-road, and we may fairly suppose that a similar assumption underlay the Roman cure for epilepsy. Further, we seem to be now justified in holding that originally, when a Roman dictator sought to stay a plague, to restore concord, or to terminate an epidemic of madness by knocking a nail into a wall, he was doing for the commonwealth exactly what any private man might do for an epileptic patient by knocking a nail into the ground on the spot where his poor friend had collapsed. In other words, he was hammering the plague, the discord, or the madness into a hole from which it could not get out to afflict the community again. 234 234 The analogy of the Roman custom to modern superstitious practices has been rightly pointed out by Mr. E. S. Hartland ( Folk-lore , iv. (1893) pp. 457, 464; Legend of Perseus , ii. 188), but I am unable to accept his general explanation of these and some other practices as modes of communion with a divinity.