ligiously dangerous. I am not sure how his expulsion from religious
rites is to be explained. It is, however, as well to note that criminals
were in primitive societies thought to be uncanny, probably because the
commonest of all crimes, if not the only one affecting society as a
whole, was the breaking of taboo, which made the individual an
outcast.[47] And we may put this together with the fact that in the
early City-state such outcasts were probably not kept shut up in a
prison, but allowed to wander about secured with chains; this seems a
fair inference from the power which the priest of Jupiter (_Flamen
Dialis_) possessed of releasing from his chains any prisoner who entered
his house, _i.e._ who had taken refuge there as in an asylum.[48] Thus
the fettered criminal, who was certainly not a citizen, might find his
way to the place where a sacrifice was going on, and have to submit to
expulsion together with the strangers. It is, however, also possible
that the iron of the chains, if they were of iron, made him doubly
dangerous; for, as we shall see directly, iron was taboo, and the chains
of the prisoner who took refuge with the Flamen had to be thrown out of
the house, no doubt for this reason, by the _impluvium_.[49]

Turning to inanimate objects, which are supposed by primitive man to be
dangerous or taboo, we are met by a fact which will astonish
anthropologists, and which I cannot satisfactorily explain. Blood is
everywhere in the savage world regarded with suspicion and anxiety;
there is something mysterious about it as containing (so they thought)
the life, and its colour and smell are also uncanny; horses cannot
endure it, and there are still strong men who faint at the sight of it.
Yet at Rome, so far as I can discover, there was in historical times
hardly a trace left of this anxiety in its original form of taboo; the
religious law had effectually eliminated the various chances that might
arouse it. No student of Roman religious antiquities seems to have
noticed this singular fact. No anthropologist, as far as I know, has
observed that among the many taboos to which the Flamen Dialis was
subject, blood does not appear. The reason no doubt is that
anthropologists are not as a rule Roman historians; their curiosity is
not excited by a fact which must have some explanation in Roman
religious history. From a single passage of Festus (p. 117) we learn
that soldiers following the triumphal car carried laurel "ut