If we wished to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.[1] The stranger, on the contrary, is one who has not access to the worship, one whom the gods of the city do not protect, and who has not even the right to invoke them. For these national gods do not wish to receive prayers and offering except from citizens; they repulse the stranger; entrance into their temples is forbidden to him, and his presence during the sacrifice is a sacrilege. Evidence of this ancient sentiment of repulsion has remained in one of the principal rites of Roman worship. The pontiff, when he sacrifices in the open air, must have his head veiled: "For before the sacred fires in the religious act which is offered to the national gods, the face of a stranger must not appear to the pontiff; the auspices would be disturbed."[2] A sacred object which fell for a moment into the hands of a stranger at once became profane. It could not recover its religious character except by an expiatory ceremony,[3] If the enemy seized upon a city, and the citizens succeeded in recovering it, above all things it was important that the temples should be purified and all the fires extinguished and rekindled. The presence of the Stranger had defiled them.[4]
Thus religion established between the citizen and the stranger a profound and ineffaceable distinction. This
- ↑ Demosthenes, in Neæram, 113, 114. Being a citizen was called, in Greek, (
Greek characters), that is to say, making the sacrifice together, or (Greek characters).
- ↑ Virgil, Æn., III. 406. Festus, v, Exesto : Lictor in quibusdam sacris clamitabat, hostis exesto. Hostis, as we know, meant stranger (Macrobius I. 17); hostilis facies, in Virgil, means the face of a stranger.
- ↑ Digest, XI. tit. 6, 36.
- ↑ Plutarch, Aristides, 20. Livy, V. 50.
