The poet argues that a land devoid of legends is destined to die
of ice, and this might well be true. A people without myths, on the other hand,
is still extinct. The role of myths is to articulate dramatically the
philosophy under which a society lives; not only to hold out to its conscience
the beliefs it recognizes and the ideals it pursues from generation to
generation, but also to express its own being and nature, the components,
relations, balances, and conflicts that compose it.
These myths may come in a variety of forms. Others are literary
fictions incarnating important concepts of the philosophy in certain personages
and translating the relationships between these concepts into the connections
between various figures. Others are set beyond the narrow limits and few
millennia of national history, adorning a distant past or future and
inaccessible zones where gods, giants, goblins, and demons have their sport;
some are happy with common citizens, familiar locations, and plausible ages.
However, both tales have the same reason for existence.
The comparative study of the earliest Indo-European civilizations,
which has been ongoing for decades, has had to consider both the myths'
pragmatic unity and the diversity of mythic forms. In fact, it became obvious
almost instantly that the Romans are not, at all, a people without mythology—as
textbooks now love to depict them—but rather that mythology, and in particular
a very old mythology inherited in large part from Indo-European times, has
thrived under the framework of history, despite having been ruined at the level
of theology.
The narratives and types of personages, as well as the very
structures of the traditions surrounding these personages, which were ascribed
to the divine world by the Indians and Germans, either completely or in their
essential features, have been rediscovered in the Roman setting, with the same
structure and lesson, but ascribed exclusively to men, and to men with typical
Roman names, be it.
On one level, a theology, neat and simple in any field of which we
have some knowledge, describing abstractly, ordering a hierarchy, and,
according to these definitions, setting up groups of powerful gods, but gods
without adventures. On the other hand, a tradition of beginnings tracing the
major deeds of men who, in character and purpose, are analogous to these gods.
Consider the core motif of Indo-European ideology: the assumption
that the world and culture will only exist in equilibrium if the three
stratified roles of authority, force, and fecundity operate together
harmoniously.
This creation is articulated in India in both religious and human
words, in a theological and epic ensemble; moreover, the gods, like the
characters, are represented as having colorful experiences, or at the very
least as executing deeds or activities that express their essences, roles, and
relationships.
The two main sovereign gods, Varuna, the all-powerful magician,
and Mitra, the contract personified, have created and organized the worlds,
with their plan and overall mechanisms, at the first level of Vedic theology;
at the second level, Indra, the physically powerful god, is engaged in a number
of magnificent duels, conquests, and victories; and at the third level, the
twins are the heroes of short well described
scenes.
A contrast can be seen in the epic material from the Mahabharata,
which was developed only later but has been seen to have
continued a very old and partly pre-Vedic tradition; Pandu and his five
putative sons evolve the same philosophy of the three roles through their
character, acts, and adventures.
Pandu and the eldest Pandava, Yudhisthira, both kings in contrast
from the others, incarnate the two facets of authority, Varunian and Mitrian;
the second and third Pandavas, Bhima and Arjuna, incarnate the two aspects of
the warrior's power, being violent and chivalrous, which the Rig Veda puts
together in the solitary Indra. The fourth and fifth sons, the twins Nakula and
Sahadeva, embody many of the divine twins' virtues, including benevolence,
modesty, readiness to lead, and expertise in cattle and horse breeding.
In the exploits of her gods and heroes, India thus offers a double
mythical manifestation of the trifunctional philosophy. The analysis of the
relations between these two mythologies is still in its early stages, but they
do intersect, at least in part.
In 1954, it was discovered that one of the Vedic exploits of the
warrior god Indra, his duel with the Sun god, has an exact analogue in one of
the epic exploits of the warrior hero Arjuna: just as Indra is triumphant in
the duel because he detaches or pushes down one of the solar chariot's wheels,
Arjuna is victorious because he detaches or pushes down one of the solar
chariot's wheels. In the eighth book of the Mahabharata, Arjuna, the son of
Indra, defeats Karna, the son of the Sun, only when one of the latter's chariot
wheels miraculously falls into the earth.
Five years later, the sovereignty was equally recognized as
Yudhisthira, his father, and two uncles. Another tableau, a documentation in a
different kind, emerges in the Roman sense. The gods of the pre-Capitoline
triad, those of the great flamens, are well expressed and patronized, in their
hierarchy, by the three roles.
However, having noted that Jupiter and his variant Dius Fidius
embody the two facets of authority, strength, and law, that Mars is a dominant
warrior deity, and that Quirinus communicates and guarantees some essential
aspects of the third role (social mass and vigilant peace; agricultural
prosperity) directly or through his flamen, one has exhausted what can be said
about these divinities. Their relation can be found in their hierarchy, and
their entire being can be found in their meanings, which leave no room for
narrative accounts.
This dramatic unfolding of character, which the gods ignore, forms
the very foundation of epic, of an epic—accepted as historical by Titus Livius
and Plutarch, the former with trepidation and the latter with devotion—the
history of Rome's first kings. We have a chronological history here, but unlike
the Mahabharata, Roman mythology has not grouped its trifunctional heroes into
a community of contemporaries, of brothers hierarchized so that the first alone
is king and the others his specialized auxiliaries.
As seems to have been the case in the Iranian epic as well, Roman
history has spread them in time, in a series of kings, each of whom
communicates and contributes to the collective undertaking one of the roles, or
an aspect of one of the functions, important to the wellbeing of the community,
through his character, founding acts, and whole life.
While the importance of the first reigns' character and
arrangement has been discussed many times in the last thirty years, it is worth
revisiting here since one of those reigns, Tullus', would be the subject of our
current study. But let us first note — and we cannot emphasize this enough —
that the scheme devised by the first kings of Rome was not devised by us; the
Romans understood, explained, appreciated, and saw in it the influence of divine
benevolence: all we had to do was pay attention to their sentiment.
Thus, Rome's origins, the pre-Etruscan years, were concentrated as
a revolutionary creation in many stages, with the gods' caressing each time a
different style of ruler, builder of new institutions, in tune with the needs
of the time.
These phases have been seen to correlate to the Varunian component
of the role of sovereignty—creative and awful strength, organizing and
benevolent authority—, the function of martial force, and some aspects of the
dynamic third function.
The following are the kings:
Romulus, the demigod of enigmatic birth and youth, the city's
founder, the redoubtable king armed with spears, poles, and bonds.
Numa, the intelligent, religious, and fully human creator of cults,
priesthoods, and laws
Tullus Hostilius, the purely warlike king, aggressive, who bestows
control on R o m e by military means.
Ancus Marcius, the king who saw a significant rise in the Roman
plebes and economic opulence, and who only went to war when forced to defend
Rome.
For the first three founding kings, this practical explanation has
been universally accepted: the clearly intentional antithesis between Romulus
and Numa, remembering the two opposite but important facets of the first
feature, and Tullus' wholly warlike character need little debate.
For the fourth king, Ancus Marcitis, things were different.
Despite the long-recognized anachronisms in his work, one cannot help but feel
that it is with Ancus Marcitis that historical accuracy starts to bear some
weight in the traditions; that he portrays, in the sequence of kings, the stage
at which a strictly fictional history, intended merely to justify, is welded to
a history.
This sort of bringing down to earth of a people's or dynasty's
past speculations is still a delicate point for the critic: What ordinal word,
for example, must the human mantle be put first in the sequence of
Ynglingar—those descendants of the god Freyr who gradually became the very real
kings of the Swedish Upland, then of southern Norway?
The issue is still being discussed, and there is a wide range of
viewpoints. As a result, one hesitates—and many do—to remember, either in one
part of his history or a part of his identity, a final fragment of a
pseudohistory of mystical origin only meant to explain the successive
appearances of the three roles.
Whatever the epic expression of the third function may be, which
is still complex and enigmatic since it is multiform, the understanding of the
first two functions and their members, the two leaders Romulus and N u m a, and
their immediate successor Tullus, is certain. That will suffice for the dilemma
we'll be discussing now. The military work of king Tullus has been followed in
depth, in his character, in his structures, and in his profession, in a small book
that has been lauded by some and condemned by others as outrageous, but which
has endured more than a quarter-century of self-criticism.
Tullus replaced Numa Pompilius, who was given the throne gladly as
a mark of gratitude for his bravery. Both military discipline and the art of
warfare were created by him. So, having wondrously educated Rome's soldiers
[iuuentus], he ventured to defy the Albans, an important and for a long-time
leading citizen. The king himself is depicted as a traditional iuuenis: Not
only was this king unlike the previous [the pacific Numa], but he was even more
warlike [ferocior] than Romulus. Aside from his youth and courage, he was also
motivated by his grandfather's glory [the most prestigious of Romulus'
companions].
So, thinking that the country was decrepit from inaction, he found
reasons also'- where for stirring up war Tullus is such a professional of war,
and more especially of military life and creation, that even when Rome was
afflicted with a pestilence, the warlike king who believed, besides, that the
young men [iuuenes] were heaving, no respite from service was permitted by the
warlike king who believed, besides, that.
Finally, his entire eulogy is composed of a single phrase: magna
gloria belli regnauit annos duos et Iriginta. Four centuries later, the
Christian Orosius, giving a bird's-eye view of world history, was to echo this
persistent practice in three words: Tulius Hostilius, miiitaris rei instilutor.
On the basis of this practical description of the third king of
Rome, we attempted to understand the most famous episode in Tullus' reign—the
duel between Horace and the Curiaces—in the light of a comparative analysis of
the myths, legends, and practices synonymous with the same role, that of the
warrior, among other Indo-European peoples, in the book described above,
published in 1942.
This little drama in three scenes seemed to us to be—the duel
between the three brothers, from which one of the three Roman champions emerges
alone but victorious; the cruel scene in which the knight, intoxicated and
exuberant with victory, murders his sister before the city gates for her crime
of exposing the feminine vulnerability of a lover's sorrow.
Finally, the Roman adaptation, reduced to the usual categories of
experience, emptied of its mysterious causality, and colored in accordance with
Roman morality, of a series of scenes readily comparable to that in an Ulster
legend which constitutes the story of the Black Prince—is but the Roman
adaptation, reduced to the usual categories of experience, emptied of its
mysterious causality, and colored in accordance with Roman morality, of a
series of scenes readily comparable to that in an Ulster legend which
constitutes the story.
Cuchulainn, still a boy, travels to his country's border,
provokes, and defeats the three sons of Nechta, the Ulates' constant foes.
Then, outside himself, in a terrifying and deadly state of magical fury born of
battle, he returns to the capital, where a lady, the queen, attempts to calm
him down with the crudest of sexual propositions. Cuchulainn rejects the deal,
but the Ulates seize him and submerge him in enormous vats of freezing water,
effectively killing him.
He will now keep this talent, which makes him immortal and is the
priceless product of his initiation, in reserve to re-energize himself when war
requires it and to avoid endangering his own people.
The topic of a 1942 research is a contrast of the Irish account
and the ceremonial realities it retains with Horace's strictly literary work.
There, is proposed an evolutionary model to explain the transition from one
style to the next: once the savage ideal and grand manner of the Italic
warriors of prehistory (as it remained of the warriors of Celtic and Germanic
epic) 'had been depreciated for the sake of legionary discipline, the scenes of
the narrative, while retaining their order, were depreciated for the sake of
legionary discipline.
The confrontation of aggressive virility with unleashed femininity
abandoned the troubled regions of sex and took the form of a mystical force; a
justified and almost rational rage, provoked from without and after the
exploit, was substituted for the physical and spontaneous exaltation of the
whole being during the exploit; and, above all, the confrontation of aggressive
virility with unleashed femininity abandoned the troubled regions of sex and
took the form of a mystical force.
Cuchulainn's and Horace's exploits are two versions, or rather two
neighboring forms of the same version, of a ceremonial or legendary exploit
known from other examples in the literatures of many Indo-European peoples: the
risky battle of a deity or hero against an opponent blessed with some sort of
triplicity. Significantly, the Indo-Iranian tradition knows of other
expressions of the same theme of similar intent: on the one hand, Indra's duel
with a tricephalic being, or the duel of a hero he is defending, and on the
other, Oraetaona's fight with another creature created from the same mold.
It is also true that the Irish version, which is compassionate and
pseudo-historical like the Latin, is best suited to explaining certain key
facts, especially anything that relates to, or has related to, the concept of
furor in the story's likely prehistoric nature. However, those correspondences
between the defeat of the Indian Tricephal and that of the Curiaces, which
illuminate them in a more metaphysical light and open insights on the warrior
role that are much simpler than those revealed by the legend of Cuchulainn, are
less striking at first sight because they are less vivid.
Moreover, almost the entire legend of King Tullus Hostilius has,
from one stage to the next, found its parallel in the most famous exploits of
the god Indra. Thus, between Rome and India, that remarkable and profound
identity—first observed at the level of Romulus and Varuna, Numa Pompilius and
Mitra—will extend itself to the second cosmic and social level, both in the
ideology and in its mythical expression.
