1 Earliest Rome

4,5 The grove of the Arval Brothers
, where he wants to define the view of the eyes. When they say
'viewing , they add 'reflecting' , a word which comes from the
vision of the heart \ for cor Is the root of cortumio. 4
He adds that templa are to be tesca , 5
which, according to
those who have written dictionaries, means that they are sacrosanct. This is incorrect. For
the senate house 6
is a temple and it is not sacrosanct. But the notion that a temple
is a consecrated building seems to have stemmed from the fact
that in the city of Rome most consecrated buildings are temples and at the
same rime sacrosanct and from the fact that some places in the countryside which are the
possession of a particular god are called tesca. 1
1. Contrasted to the templum of the sky, discussed by Varro in the previous section.
2. An area of the Capitoline hill at Rome, regularly used for observing signs from the gods.
3. The original text of this formula is very uncertain. It has become distorted in its trans­
mission from antiquity (as medieval scribes made frequent mistakes in copying such
archaic and obscure sentences); but it may well have been 'distorted' even by the time
Varro was writing. Our translation attempts only to give some general idea of the con­
tent of the formula.
4. Varro is speculating on the meaning of the words at the end of the formula. He tries to
relate the root of the word templum to words for watching, gazing and viewing; hence
his stress on ''cantemphit, even though it is not used in the formula.
5. The text of the Latin is uncertain here. We have translated the version usually given in
modern editions; but the apparent equation of templa with tesca hardly seems to make
sense.
6. As well as most of the buildings we call 'temples' (together with their precincts) and some
altars, the senate house and rostra (speaking platform) in the forum were inaugurated
templa.
7. Varro here draws the distinction between the sense of templum as 'inaugurated space'
and the different, but overlapping, category of'sacred buildings'.
4.5 The grove of the Arval Brothers
A religious site might incorporate a wide range of structures besides a templebuilding,
altar and precinct. The cult centre of the Arval Brothers was in a
woodland clearing {lucus) a few kilometres outside Rome and included not just
an aedeswhh a statue of the goddess Dea Dia, but also a bath building, tetrastylum
(a building with four columns - here used as a dining-room), a shrine of
the imperial cult (Caesareum), and a circus building (for races). The surviving
record of the rituals shows how the priests, in performing the different elements
of their ceremonies, moved between different parts of the site and its different
buildings. This extract records the second day of the festival of Dea Dia,
19 May a.d. 87.
See further: Vol. 1, Map 4; for the nature of the cult and its inscribed record,
Beard (1985)*; Scheid (1990); for an account of excavations on the site, Broise
and Scheid (1987); (1993); for sacred groves (often associated with temples,
even in the city of Rome itself), Coarelli (1987) 16-19, 165-85; Cazanove
87