Comparative Mythology
Jaan PuhvelSözler ve Alıntılar
Mater Matuta is a cover name for the dawn goddess Aurora. Her festival Matralia was close to the summer solstice. This is how Plutarch in Life of Camillus describes her ritual: "Women led a female servant to the sanctuary and beat her with rods, thereupon they drove her away and take into their arms their sisters' children." This puzzling activity become intelligible with reference to the mythology of the Vedic dawn-goddess Ushas, where the young sun god is nurtured by his maternal aunt and where the tarrying dawn is violently chased from the morning scene.
Camillus, who dedicated the temple of Mater Matuta at Rome, figures in Plutarch and Livy as the great Roman military leader of about 400 BCE. Many of his victories were won by sudden onslaughts and sallies at daybreak, something not repeated of other Roman generals, which makes him suspect as the transposed epic replica of sun-god himself. That Camillus was indeed a "solar" warrior is visible from the other details of his carrier, such as the triple accusation brought against him, the most serious of which was a sacrilegiously excessive triumphal procession more fit for a sun chariot.
Much in Pūṣan's dossier resembles the various functions of the Greek god Hermes(messenger, cattleman, psychopomp) and of Hermes's son Pan; the latter's name(Pan < Paon < *Pauson) is related to Pūṣan. The Indic-Greek parallel points here to an ancient Indo-European cattle-god whose role has come to transcend rangeland concepts and take in far-ranging nomadic horizons.
Mars was the war-god minus the storm-god function, but still a much greater figure of Roman religion than his Greek opposite number Ares. Unlike his stock image in modern cartoon his agrarian aspect as patron of the husbandman almost outweighs its martial role.
A kind of downward pressure of hierarchies seems to obtain in the Roman pantheon: the heavenly ruler has invaded the airspace, pushing the war-god out of the thunder-god role and toward the "third estate, commoners"; in Greece on the other hand, Zeus' similar expansion as dispenser of war left Ares little to do but rage and dally with Aphrodite.
The cult of a particular deity was directed by a flamen. The flamines maiores were the flamen dialis, flamen martialis and flamen quirilianis. This set is important by revealing the structure of pre-Capitoline Roman pantheon to have been anchored on Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus.
The siege of Rome by Etruscan king Porsenna and the Battle of Lake Regillus, exhibits elements that may point to another epicization of Indro-European eschatological battle myth like Kurushetra and Ragnarök. The personalities of the war, Horatius Cocles ('Cyclops', one-eyed) with his paralyzing gaze, and Mucius Scaevola 'Lefty', who burns up his right hand to back up a heroic trickery, are epic exemplars of Jupiter and Dius Fidius, with bodily mutilations matching their Scandinavian counterparts, the one-eyed host paralyzer Odin and the legal guardian Tyr who lost his right hand as a pledge in the maw of cosmic wolf Fenrir. Significantly the priests of Fides, installed by Numa, symbolically bandaged their right hands.
In this way it is conceivable that, as in the Mahabharata, the passing of old order and establishment of the Republic were cast in the epicized mold of the old eschatological myth of destruction and regeneration of the world order, with Pandavas versus Kauravas and Patriots versus Tarquins playing the roles still reserved for gods in Iran and Scandinavia.