of a household could get
rid of the ghosts by spitting out black beans[183] from his mouth and
saying, "With these I redeem me and mine." Nine times he says this
without looking round: then come the ghosts behind him and gather up the
beans unseen. After other quaint performances he nine times repeats the
formula, "Manes exite paterni," then at last looks round, and the ghosts
are gone.[184] This is plainly a survival from the private life of the
primitive household, and well illustrates its fears and anxieties; but
the State provided, as we shall see, another and more religious
ceremony, put limitations on the mischievous freedom of the ghosts, and
ordained the means of expiation for those who had made a slip in the
funeral ceremonies, or whose dead had been buried at sea or had died in
a far country.

I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its
relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe.
We have seen enough, I think, to conclude that it had a strong desire to
be in right relations with that Power, and to understand its will; but
we may doubt whether that desire had as yet become very effective. The
circumstances of the life of the Latin farmer were hardly such as to rid
him of much of the _religio_ that he had inherited from his wilder
ancestors, or had found springing up afresh within him as he contended
with the soil, the elements, and the hostile beings surrounding him,
animal, human, and spiritual. He is living in an age of transition; he
is half-way between the age of magic and a new age of religion and duty.

NOTES TO LECTURE IV

[131] Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of the
Kingship_, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of
Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of
Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely
legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense,
they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship
held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian.
Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 403 foll., believes that the
original Latin population, _i.e._ the plebs of later
times, lived under Mutterrecht.

[132] Aust, _Religion der Roemer_, p. 212.

[133] In historical times the household deities were
often represented by images of Greek type: _e.g._ the
Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, _Rel. und
Kult._ p. 147, and _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p.