lly
burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the
case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter
into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering
together with him.[348] The two former are constant and typical in the
Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson
Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the
ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example
is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the
victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by
the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance
being attached to the due distribution.[349] Here the Latin race "yearly
acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in
the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with
Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by
participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is
perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and
were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the
clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn
sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the
_epulum Iovis_ on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the
Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities
seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the
magistrates and senate.[350] But we have not yet arrived at the age when
this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the
rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however,
faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in
some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at
one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a
whole, but of the thirty _curiae_ into which it was divided,[351] there
seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods
were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though
invisible. Yet the _ius divinum_ of the Roman State assuredly did not
encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State
festivals, in which we cannot include even the _feriae Latinae_, the
sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular.
If I am no