The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early

       society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place.

       Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Liby-

       ans awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king,

       and the one who reached him first was ennobled. According to tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who

       set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started.

       The famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run

       for no less a prize than a kingdom.

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       These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or pretence. Thus "there is one race, called the 'Love Chase,' which may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a

       fleet horse, and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who catches her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the utmost, to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the one whom she has already chosen in her heart." The race

       for the bride is found also among the Koryaks of Northeastern Asia. It takes place in a large tent, round which many separate com-

       partments called pologs are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through

       all the compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the encampment place every obstacle in the man's

       way, tripping him up, belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes

       it and waits for him. Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and

       Norse languages possess in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race. Moreover, traces of the custom survived

       into modern times.

       Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic contest.

       There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should have

       resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct, the

       Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort, and in the character of these divinities went through the annual

       ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus

       they did what in more northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May were believed to do in days of old. Now we

       have seen that the right to play the part of the King of May and to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by an

       athletic contest, particularly by a race. This may have been a relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom

       designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king

       in order to ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on

       which, even more than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety and prosperity of the community were believed to

       depend. And it would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the

       sake of publicly demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high calling. A relic of that test perhaps survived in the

       ceremony known as the Flight of the King (regifugium), which continued to be annually observed at Rome down to imperial times.

       On the twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred

       Rites fled from the Forum. We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual kingship, which may

       have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year the king might run again for a second term of office; and

       so on, until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what had once been a race would tend to assume the character

       of a flight and a pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran after him, and if he were overtaken he had

       to yield the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of masterful character might succeed in

       seating himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form which it seems always to have

       been within historical times. The rite was sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the expulsion of the kings from Rome; but

       this appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to explain a ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten. It is far more

       likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred Rites was merely keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been

       annually observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain

       more or less a matter of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested with a full sense of the difficulty and obscurity in which

       the subject is involved.

       Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office award-

       ed, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as a god and

       goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in supposing that in

       very early times the old Latin kings personated a god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better understand the

       mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them are said to have come. We have seen that, according to tradition, one of the

       kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously mimicking the thunder of Jupiter. Romulus is said to have vanished mysteri-

       ously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the day on which

       he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take cer-

       tain remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from

       the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each

       other. Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium

       offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men, to whom he had given umbrage, despatched him with the sacrificial

       knives and spits which they had snatched from the altar. The occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the slaughter