quasi
purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem"; and this is the only distinct
relic of the idea that I can find. Pliny's _Natural History_, that
wonderful thesaurus of odds and ends, affords no help; the mystic
qualities of blood are hardly alluded to there, and the same can be said
of Servius' commentary on the _Aeneid_. The word blood is not to be
found in the index to Wissowa's great work, of which the supreme value
is its accurate record of the religious law and all the ceremonies of
the State. I am constrained to believe that the priests or priest-kings
who developed the _ius divinum_ of the Roman City-state deliberately
suppressed the superstition, for reasons which it is impossible to
conjecture with certainty. And this guess, which I put forward with
hesitation, is indeed in keeping with certain other facts of Roman life.
It is doubtful whether human sacrifice ever existed among this
people;[50] it is certain that the execution of citizens in civil life
by beheading was abandoned at a very early period.[51] The shedding of
blood, except when a victim was sacrificed under the rules of sacred
law, was carefully avoided; thus the horror of blood had a social and
ethical result of value, instead of remaining a mere _religio_ (taboo).
It is true that in one or two rites, such as that of the October horse,
the blood of a sacrifice seems to have been thought to possess peculiar
powers;[52] but it is at the same time noticeable that this rite is not
included in the old calendar, a fact of which a wholly satisfactory
explanation has not yet been offered. In the Lupercalia there is a trace
of the mystic use of blood in sacrifice, but a very faint one: to this
we shall return later on. The two Luperci had their foreheads smeared
with the knife bloody from the slaughter of the victims, but the blood
was at once wiped off with wool dipped in milk.[53] This rite is of
course in the old calendar; it stands almost alone in its mystical
character, and may have been taken over by the Romans from previous
inhabitants of the site of Rome. Lastly, in the Terminalia, or
boundary-festival of arable land in country districts, the
boundary-stone was sprinkled with the blood of the victims, showing that
a spirit, or _numen_, was believed to reside in it;[54] but I cannot
find that this practice survived in the public sacrifices of the city.
It is found only in the sacrifices (_Graeco ritu_) supervised by the _XV
viri sacris faciundis_ in