al
tribes whose ordinary food consists of vegetables, the slaughter
of cattle was at once a household feast and an act of worship: a
pig was the most acceptable offering to the gods, just because it
was the usual roast for a feast. But all extravagance of expense
as well as all excess of rejoicing was inconsistent with the solid
character of the Romans. Frugality in relation to the gods was
one of the most prominent traits of the primitive Latin worship;
and the free play of imagination was repressed with iron severity
by the moral self-discipline which the nation maintained. In
consequence the Latins remained strangers to the excesses which
grow out of unrestrained indulgence. At the very core of the Latin
religion there lay that profound moral impulse which leads men to
bring earthly guilt and earthly punishment into relation with the
world of the gods, and to view the former as a crime against the
gods, and the latter as its expiation. The execution of the criminal
condemned to death was as much an expiatory sacrifice offered to
the divinity as was the killing of an enemy in just war; the thief
who by night stole the fruits of the field paid the penalty to
Ceres on the gallows just as the enemy paid it to mother earth and
the good spirits on the field of battle. The profound and fearful
idea of substitution also meets us here: when the gods of the
community were angry and nobody could be laid hold of as definitely
guilty, they might be appeased by one who voluntarily gave himself
up (-devovere se-); noxious chasms in the ground were closed,
and battles half lost were converted into victories, when a brave
burgess threw himself as an expiatory offering into the abyss or
upon the foe. The "sacred spring" was based on a similar view;
all the offspring whether of cattle or of men within a specified
period were presented to the gods. If acts of this nature are to
be called human sacrifices, then such sacrifices belonged to the
essence of the Latin faith; but we are bound to add that, far back
as our view reaches into the past, this immolation, so far as life
was concerned, was limited to the guilty who had been convicted
before a civil tribunal, or to the innocent who voluntarily chose
to die. Human sacrifices of a different description run counter
to the fundamental idea of a sacrificial act, and, wherever they
occur among the Indo-Germanic stocks at least, are based on later
degeneracy and barbarism. They nev