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Two Roman Rites
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
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I. It has long been a standing puzzle why the women at the festival of Mater Matuta (the Matralia, June 11) prayed, not for their own children, but for their sisters' offspring. The attempts to connect it with any sociological phenomenon are purely absurd, and would not have been noticed but for their association with one or two famous names and the complete ignorance of non-European systems of relationship prevailing among the scholars of an older generation. There is no system under which a woman is closer akin to her sister's children than to her own; for under father-right a nephew or niece is further off than an own child, and if the system be pushed to the most logical and most absurd extremity, so as to make a child kin to his father only, not his mother, then he is also no kin to his mother's sister; under mother-right, which Rome never had in any form whatsoever, the mother is still nearer kin than the maternal aunt; while if ever there was, anywhere in the world, a classificatory system so pure and rigorous as to make no distinction between the actual mother and any other woman of the same age-class, then mother and aunt were in the same degree of kinship to every member of the younger generation. No ritual explanation I know will bear investigating. Yet the fact is handed down to us on good authority, probably that of Verrius Flaccus, the most likely common source for Ovid and Plutarch.
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page 156 note 1 Ovid, , Fast., vi, 553Google Scholar, nec tamen hanc pro stirpe sua pia mater adoret; | ipsa parum felix uisa fuisse parens. | alterius prolem melius mandabitis illi; | utilior Baccho quam fuit ipsa suis. Plutarch, , quaest. Rom., 267eGoogle Scholar, δι⋯ τι παρ⋯ τῇ θεῷ ταύτῃ τoȋς μέν ίδίoις τέκνoις oὔκ εὔχoνται τ⋯γαθ⋯ τoȋς δ⋯ τ⋯ν ⋯δελπ⋯ν de frat. amor., 492d, αἱ 'Pωμαἱων γυναῖκες ⋯ν ταῖς τ⋯ς ∧ευκοθ⋯ας ⋯ορταῖς, ἢν Mατο⋯ταν ⋯νομ⋯ζουσιν ού τοὺς ⋯αυτ⋯ν παῖδας ⋯λλ⋯ τοὑς τ⋯ν ⋯δελφ⋯ν ⋯ναγκαλἱζονται κα⋯ τιμ⋯σιν. This last seems to be inaccurate; we nowhere else hear of children being present at the Matralia at all, to be petted or otherwise ‘honoured’; Tertullian, , de monog., 17Google Scholar, says, Fortunae Muliebri coronam non imponit nisi uniuira, sicut nee Matri Matutae, which seems to imply that only women living in a first marriage took part in the rites at all, and Ovid, , loc. cit., 469Google Scholar, calls only on bonae matres to celebrate the festival. I suggest that Plutarch got his information in the quaest. Rom. from Verrius, that in the de frat. amor. from hearsay, inaccurate memory, or some other inferior source, unless indeed έναλκαλίζονται is corrupt.
page 156 note 2 See for instance Wissowa, R.K.R. 2, p. III, ‘wohl eine Erinnerung an eine vorzeitliche, von der späteren abweichende Auffassung des Verwandtschaftsverhältnisses.’ That a writer so eminently clear-headed should make a suggestion so groundless is explicable by the fact that his one serious weakness as a researcher was a lack of anthropological training.
page 156 note 3 The supposed traces of it are considered and disposed of by the present writer in Folk-Lore, xxxi. (1920), p. 93Google Scholarsqq.
page 156 note 4 That traces of a classificatory system lingered in the Roman nomenclature of kinship I still believe, see J.R.S. xii. (1922), p. 120Google Scholarsqq.; Prim. Cult, in It., p. 162 sqq.; but I no longer feel any confidence that a state of things ever existed in which the Romans or anyone else recognised classificatory relationships only, to the exclusion of blood kinship.
page 156 note 5 In this condemnation I include my own tentative suggestion, Roman Quest. of Plut., p. 176.
page 156 note 6 For the latest discussion of the age of the Roman calender, see Altheim, Fr., Römische Religionsgeschichte, i, p. 56Google Scholarsqq.
page 157 note 1 So, in antiquity, Lucretius, v, 656; in modern times, Wissowa, , op. cit., p. 110Google Scholar.
page 157 note 2 de ciuit. Dei. iv, 8.
page 157 note 3 See Mnemosyne, N.S. liii (1925), p. 407Google Scholarsqq. Whatmough's views are summarized, pp. 413–414.
page 157 note 4 Plautus, frag. 82 Lindsay; tune papillae primulum | fraterculabant, illud uolui dicere, | sororiabant.
page 157 note 5 The latter fact is preserved in the Fasti Amiternini, C.I.L., I, i2 p. 244.
page 157 note 6 Cf. the double meaning of Gk. στρατ⋯ς. The latest edition of Walde hesitates to accept such a meaning for populus because there is no direct proof of it; if the above conjecture is right, the derivation of populo(r) seems to become more plausible.
page 158 note 1 C.Q., xvii (1923), p. 202Google Scholar.