Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

104 Magic [ch.
that they should be drowned. The Tiber shrinks back from
contact with so much royal mana and leaves the twins on dry
ground. There they are suckled by—a she- wolf.
Ovid in his polite way assumes that we shall know a little more
elementary mythology ; that we shall not forget that the wood-
pecker too was their foster-nurse, who, though he might not suckle
them, yet raven-like brought them their daily bread.
Lacte quis infantes nescit crevisse ferino,
Et picum expositis saepe tulisse cibos 1 .
On a denarius 2 of Sextus Pompeius Faustulus (Fig. 18) the scene
is depicted in full. The she-wolf and the twins; above them the
sacred fig-tree (Ficus ruminalis), and perched upon it the sacred
birds.
In Rome to-day an old she-wolf still howls in desolation on the
Capitoline hill ; but there is no woodpecker to make lamentation.
Picus was an oracular bird, a tree-guardian, a guardian of
kings ; he was also himself a king, king over a kingdom ancient
and august. Vergil 3 tells how when iEneas sent his messengers
to interview the aged Latinus they found him in his house ' stately
and vast, upreared on an hundred columns, once the palace of
Laurentian Picus, amid awful groves of ancestral sanctity.' It
was a place at once palace and temple, befitting the old divine
king. There each successive king received the inaugural sceptre.
There was the sacred banqueting hall, where after the sacrifice of
rams the elders were wont to sit at the long tables. ' There stood
around in the entry the images of the forefathers of old in ancient
cedar '—figures some of them faint and impersonal, Italus and
Sabinus, mere eponyms, but among them figures of flesh and
blood, primal god-kings, 'gray Saturn and the likeness of Janus
double-facing,' and—for us most important of all—holding the
divining rod of Quirinus, girt in the short augural gown, carrying
on his left arm the sacred shield, Picus the tamer of horses.
Picus equum domitor, a spleudid climax ; but Picus, the poet
1 Ovid, Fasti, in. 53.
2 Babelon, n. 336. The same scene—except that the tree is, oddly, a vine—occurs
on an antique violet paste at Berlin, published by Iruhoof Blurnner and Otto
Keller, Tier- unci Pftanzcn-bilder, PI. 21, 15, cf. Furtwangler, Geschnittene Steine
im Antiq. No. 4379. My attention was drawn to these monuments by the kindness
of Mr A. B. Cook.
3 JEn. vn. 170 ff.