Dis Geniti

Extract

All Greek religion is haunted by an anxiety, or a hope, which is generally summed up, since the great work of Mannhardt and Frazer, as the yearly worship of vegetation gods. The name is, admittedly, a little too narrow. No doubt in a simple agricultural community the chief anxiety is about next year's harvest. I am told that in Jerusalem the High Priest went out to see how the barley was getting on, and lengthened or shortened the official year accordingly. Of course there is also anxiety about the young of the flocks and herds, about the weather for sailing and the like; but I think we shall find that it extended much further. The phrase ‘Year Spirit’ is perhaps better than ‘Vegetation God’. Jane Harrison was much criticised for preferring the phrase Ἐνιαυτὸς δαίμων; but I think she was right, and perhaps more profoundly right than any of us saw at the time.

Ἐνιαυός is a curious word. The new Liddell and Scott gives its root meaning as ‘anniversary’. It seems to be formed like ἓνιοι, ἐνί-οτε, ‘there are who …’ ‘there are times when …’, and to mean ‘There is (or ‘there is present,’ the same’, ἔνι-αὐτός; or, more analytically still, ‘there is present-again-this’, ἔνι-αὖ-τός. From meaning ‘anniversary’ it comes to mean a recurrent vital day, or the period, however long, between the recurrent vital days. All kinds of events were due to occur περιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν, as in Od. A 16, which seems to mean ‘as the anniversaries recur’, but easily becomes ‘with the passing years’. Children are born (Theog. 493, Asp. 87) meaning, I think, ‘when the regular vital time comes on’, not ‘as the months pass’.