A teasing question

Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):

The name of an entity, as we have already discussed (q.v., above, concerning the Sirens), whether of a mortal or immortal, was a magical word of power. It was believed by the Romans in common with nearly every other nation that to know the real name of an entity was to have power over that entity. One might command or injure the being whose name was evoked.² In the case of a city or nation, it was believed that the genius or tutelary deity of the city or people might be persuaded to, or threatened into, the abandonment of its post as guardian of the city, thereby weakening the defense of those thus deserted. It was the usual practise of the Romans when they were besieging a town to address a plea to the genius of the city to withdraw and come over to them, promising that it would be treated far more handsomely and generously among the Romans than it had been heretofore among its own people.³

If the secret name of the god were known, then pleasantries might be followed by threats of compulsion should the god not accede. It was, therefore, the gravest matter of national security that real name of the genius of a city be known only to those who could be trusted to protect it from disclosure. In fact, Pliny goes on to say (Nat. Hist. III.67 ) that one person who had been so foolish as to disclose the name came to a bad end (q.v. below). What, then, was the secret name of Rome?

Difficulties

This is surely one of the most intricately concealed matters that could be imagined. While the genius of Rome was familiarly addressed in her personified form as Roma and thus depicted on coins, she had the formal pubic name Angerona and her festival was celebrated on December 21. Her statue, again following Pliny, represented Angerona⁴ as having a bandage over her mouth, undoubtedly to prevent her from revealing her own name and to enjoin those who served her to likewise refrain from naming her. The secret name of the deity, which, by the way, would have been the real name of the city itself, would have been known and spoken only by a very few persons, namely those who officiated at the festival of the deity, the college of her priests. The Pontifex Maximus, too, would have known the name, as would, no doubt, the chief Vestal, and, in Imperial times, the head of state, the Princeps or Emperor, who usually assumed the title and functions of the Supreme Pontiff. Nowadays, except for the Supreme Pontiff, who is not likely to worry himself over the name of a pagan deity, all those titular personages are vanished. With the one exception noted by Pliny, those who knew the name of Roma seem to have kept their oath. How then shall we hope to recover a name that was faithfully hidden for more than a millennium and has been forgotten for nearly as long? There are some clues.

An invaluable clue

Pliny himself drops one hint in the passage noted above, although it is not really evident until it is put together with another bit of information that he gives us elsewhere. While noting that it is forbidden to utter the ceremonial name of the deity, Pliny identifies the nefarious violator of the sacred trust:

Now Valerius Soranus is most probably Quintus Valerius Soranus (circa 100 B.C.), a once famous Roman antiquary and poet whose knowledge of Roman history Marcus Licinius Crassus considered unrivalled⁵. In name, at least, he was a man doubly lucky. Quintus and Valerius were particularly favored names among the Romans, and men of those names and others like them were routinely selected to take the lead in sacrifices or in new undertakings, because of the fortunate nature of their nomenclature. (Frazer. Golden Bough, cites numerous authorities.) It is not surprising, then, that a person named Quintus Valerius Soranus would have had possession of the sacred name of the protective deity of Rome, probably as a consequence of being numbered among the college of priests of the temple. Why did he betray that national trust? Being of an historical and literary turn of mind, he undoubtedly shared the scepticism that seems to characterize historians, even of that era, and he might have let slip the ineffable name, thinking, with Pliny himself, that such magical prohibitions were nonsensical. (Or he simply might have pressed his luck.) How or why the disclosure was made is irrelevant, and the name itself was not included with the story of its revelation. Of what use, then, is the information? In and of itself, no use whatsoever. Combined with something else said by Pliny and amplified elsewhere, it is very useful.

The deities of Soracte

On Mount Soracte, about twenty-five miles northeast of Rome, there was a very ancient temple served by a college of priests drawn from a small number of indigenous families of Samnite origin collectively called Hirpini. (In the same area was an oracle, which means that there was vulcanism beneath the surface, as Pliny confirms⁶. Both the oracle and the temple were sometimes said to belong to Apollo.⁷) The rites of the deity of this temple included a singular act (for Italy), which some Roman authors found sufficiently odd or miraculous that they noticed it in their works, Vergil and Silius Italicus among them. It was the duty of these priests annually to walk barefoot over a bed of live embers from a pine wood bonfire, those of unsullied character presumably passed through the flames unharmed and oblivious to pain, while those in whom the deity had found some fault suffered burns⁸ in the normal way of things. The term fumigation has been applied to the rite, because, it has been suggested, the smoke rather than the fire was the active principle, and the offerings to the god were purified when the priests carried them through the fumes arising from the smoking embers. In any case, whatever the purpose of the act, it was deemed of such vital importance to the continuing welfare of the Roman state that the Senate exempted from any further obligations of service into perpetuity the families from whom these priests were selected. This point needs to be appreciated at its full value. From our perspective, the truly singular aspect of this cultic ritual reposes not in the firewalk but in the exemption (called a vacatio) gained by it for the performers and their families.

It was sometimes permitted to a family that had rendered exceptional service to Rome, usually in war, to be relieved of some civic burden or obligation for a span of limited duration. For instance, in Republican times, families that had lost a son in battle and which were in danger of extinction could be exempted from sending a surviving son into the legions as a means of preserving the family, from the stability of which the whole strength of the Roman state was thought to arise. In the early Imperial years, Augustus would remit certain taxes for young men who had taken a wife and produced children and would fine single men who refused marriage. But exemption was usually conferred only for a generation (like a life peerage) or until such time as the continuance of the family had been assured. That an entire gens or clan should have been given this type of exemption, broadened to include all forms of civic obligation, for an indeterminate span into the future is not only exceptional, it is practically unprecedented, but that the People and Senate of Rome should confer this boon upon a group of families of foreign, in fact of Samnite origins, is simply astounding. Only the most signal and essential connection to the maintenance of Rome could have warranted such a privilege.

Frazer has thought the matter of the firewalk important enough to his own arguments to collect the references to it (Golden Bough, xi 14-15 and notes), and it is from that resource that we can draw our conclusions. The Samnite gens from whom the priests were drawn were the Hirpini, who traced their arrival in the area to a "sacred spring" of some immemorial period (Golden Bough, iv 186 and notes 4 & 5). (It was the habit of some peoples to offer all of their first born, whether human or beast, of the spring of a particular year for sacrifice to guarantee fertility. Later, this sacrifice was mitigated to include only the beasts, followed later with the expulsion of the grown children to found a new colony at some place chosen for them by their deity.) The god that led the sacred spring of the Samnites to Soracte took the form of a wolf (from the Samnite hirpus), and the people were known thereafter as the Hirpini. The god whose temple they built on the mount was called Soranus, and the priests of the god were the hirpi Sorani, the wolves of Soranus.

Equating Soranus and Angerona

It should be obvious, now, that (Quintus) Valerius Soranus must have been a member of these highly esteemed Hirpini, in fact was one of the hirpi Sorani¹⁶, and that he had a special relationship to the safety of Rome's most important secret. The knowledge for which he was acclaimed must have been gained by reason of his familial history, and it is very possible that the punishment laid upon him, of which Pliny speaks, was suffered during the firewalk, by which his impiety was proven and the requisite retribution exacted.

If, as we have argued, (Quintus) Valerius Soranus was punished during the rites of the deity of Soracte, then we must conclude that there existed between that numinous being and the tutelary goddess of Rome a very intimate connection, for it was not the normal or general habit of one deity to punish a sacrilege which had been committed against the dignity of another. Divine collegiality was not remarkable, except by its absence. Further, it seems unlikely that a priest of the deity of Soracte, who by virtue of that hereditary office had been exempted from any other state obligations, would have been also a priest of the Sacra Urbs, unless those deities were one and the same. (Gods are, by their nature, jealous.) While no precise correspondence can be demonstrated, the god of Soracte was sometimes called Feronia⁹, and the deity of Rome was sometimes called Agenoria or Ageronia.¹⁰ There might be an easy etymological descent, by way of Sancus, the Sabine god, from Soranus to Sacra Urbs¹¹. As for Feronia, the deity of Soracte appears to have been alternately male and female, and there is the temptation to believe that the worship at Soracte was directed to a pair of deities, perhaps Soranus and Sorania, much in the manner of other local Italian deity pairs.¹² The change from Sorania to Feronia is small enough to be allowed. But, even if disallowed, there is enough evidence, based upon the linkage between the cults of Soranus and Angerona in the person of Quintus Valerius Soranus, to make those cults, at least in the worship of their female aspects, identical. Could the deity of Rome, then, have been called Sorania?

Possible answer and objections

It is too much to expect that we could have found out the name so easily. It would not have been much of a secret were it thus. However, the connection appears to be sound, and the conclusion that identifies the two deities as aspects of the same is likewise strongly supported. Despite this, the use of the god's name as a cognomen would have been rather too obvious. What else did the Hirpini Samnites and Romans have in common?

Further evidence

Two creatures were held to be sacred to Mars and to have shared in caring for his twin offspring during their exposure, the wolf and the woodpecker. The wolf, we have seen, was credited with leading the Hirpini to their promised land. As it happens, the woodpecker filled a similar role for another Samnite tribe, the Piceni (from picus, woodpecker), and the woodpecker was said to be the sacred bird of Feronia, the female aspect of the deity at Soracte. That both the bird and the canine appear in the story of Romulus suggests that early Romans owed much to both tribes, and the etymology seems to support that conclusion.

The priests who performed the firewalk were, we have been told, hirpi Sorani, the "wolves of Soranus". Now the ordinary Latin for "wolf" was "lupus". hirpus does not seem to have occurred elsewhere in Latin. Yet the word is very ancient and was of the first importance to the Roman state. Curiously, while hirpus did not pass into the vulgar Latin, picus did. This strikes one as significant.¹³ Was there some special reason why hirpus did not become common? Could it have had special significance amounting to interdictum that would have prevented its assimilation?

The legend of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the she-wolf shows us exactly how important that the word was to Rome. If it were not for the wolf, the founder of Rome would not have survived on bread crumbs alone, and Rome would not have been built. In other words, the very existence of Rome was owed to the act of the wolf. Is it possible that the wolf-god of the Hirpini was the wolf-god of Romulus? Might not the Samnite tutelary god Hirpus (or Hirpa) have been the deity whom Romulus regarded as his own guardian goddess, the deity whom he established as the protector of his new city and the source of its real name? Could the secret name of Roma have been Hirpa?

A Digression

Digressing, it was during the search for Achilles' feminine name that we had occasion to mention an ancient anecdote about the birth of a child to a woman of the Ligures, who, when she was delivered of it, lay it down in a thicket and returned to her work in the fields. Besides illustrating the toughness of the people, it is a glimpse at the real origin of many exposure stories: it is an adoption story. It shows a legal (i.e. sacramental) process by which a child is naturalized as a member of a clan and thereby made a child of that clan's god. In the process, the real mother pretends to abandon the child in a reed or wicker boat or basket, (a trough in the story of Romulus and Remus) and a woman or man of the tribe into which the infant is being adopted then pretends to find the child and to make it a member of his or her family. Through its adoptive parents, the child then becomes a member of the clan. This ceremony of adoption can also be applied to adults, who must first pass through some symbolic rebirth and discovery before being accepted into the clan. This implies a willing surrender of the child by the biological parents.

Supposing for a moment that the swineherd Faustulus was of the Hirpini, then we would have to conclude that Romulus was adopted into the Hirpini tribe and that their tutelary god, Hirpus/Hirpa, became his own. To say that he was suckled by the wolf would then be as much as saying that he had been adopted into the clan. This could be a legendary reading of the historical relationship of the Romans to the native people of the area. The Romans, as newcomers, may have made a pact or treaty with the Hirpini, and part of the mechanism of treaty might have included the adoption of the Romans, through their chief, into the Hirpini clan, thereby giving the Romans natural rights. The wolf-god or goddess then became the tutelary spirit Roma who gave her sacred name to the city, binding the Romans to the Hirpini eternally. Was Faustulus of the Hirpini? The evidence is circumstantial, but there is nothing contrary.

First, Faustulus was a herdsman. He was not, therefore, of the nobility, who were all Trojans by descent, although some of the Trojans themselves were descended from a shepherd. It was in Alba as in every country which has been settled by conquerors: the nobility have been of the newcomers and the commoners have been of the indigenous peoples. It was thus in Britain after the Norman conquest, and was thus in America after the arrival of the Europeans. Second, when he found or exposed the children, he noted that they were more beautiful and of greater size than the ordinary infant, and he suspected that they were of a better birth, which seems to suggest that he was himself of low origins. Third, his wife was Larentia, who was by tradition a prostitute. Except for Justinian (and some of the madder emperors), prostitutes were not the wives of the the nobility. Faustulus was not a Trojan, was of low birth, and was married to a prostitute, but that does not make him Hirpini. He could have been Etruscan, Oscan, Sabine, Samnite, etc. There is one other clew, however, that suggests an Hirpini origin for Faustulus, and that is provided by Plutarch.

In his biography of Romulus, Plutarch repeats the claim that Acca Larentia (as he calls Larentia) was a prostitute, and adds that the Romans called prostitutes wolves (from lupus), from which some derive the story of the twins being suckled by the wolf. He goes on to say, that she is honored by the Romans with libations in April during the Larentian feast. Now this is a curious mistake, for the Larentialia is in December, as is the feast of Angerona. The major feast of April was the Palilia (or Parilia) in honor of Pales, and was celebrated as the date upon which Rome was founded, and during which the flocks are purified with smoke from sulfur and shepherds leapt over three straw ricks that have been fired. To make such a basic and obvious error seems uncharacteristic. This egregious error of juxtaposition is rendered the more remarkable in that but a few pages further in his narration he correctly places the Palilia at its proper time, as he does the Lupercalia in February. The Roman calendar was not unknown to him. Was the mistake intentional, a means by which he could say indirectly, in drawing attention to the real date of the Larentialia, that the wolf of the Hirpini was involved, a statement which, if made directly, might have come too near to disclosing the secret? Was it simply a case where he unconsciously associated the two? Whatever might have been the reason, the idea of grouping the Larentialia, Palilia, and Angeronalia (and the Lupercalia as well, for that matter) is sound enough. That Faustulus and Larentia were of the Hirpini is a reasonable, even if not irrefutable, conclusion based upon the evidence at hand.

Summation

Summing up the arguments for the theory that Hirpa was the name of the deity of Rome, hirpus is a word of such rarity that it would not have been widely known among the general populace, one measure of the sacredness of a word being its scarcity in ordinary usage. Second, Feronia and Angerona were likely the same deity, the female aspect of Soranus, the wolf god called Sancus by the Sabines and worshipped under that name at Rome. That the cult was not centered in Rome would have insulated it from discovery by Rome's enemies.¹⁴ That it was sometimes referred to Apollo¹⁵ or to other deities would have made the relationship even more obscure. Third, there is the person Valerius Soranus, apparently a member of the priesthood of both Angerona and of Feronia. Individually, these clues, Valerius Soranus, punished for an impious act offered to Angerona, the cult of Soranus at Soracte of which the hirpi Sorani were its priesthood, the prominence of the wolf in the legendary history of both the Hirpini Samnites and the Romans, might not withstand the weight of our argument, but, when spun together, they form a substantial thread by which to tie the deity worshipped at Soracte to the genius of Rome.

It is probable, therefore, that Hirpa, or some variant thereof, was the secret name of the goddess and of the city over which she spread her protection.