In the story of the founding of Rome made by Plutarch (Rom. 11) it is said that Romulus
summoned to Rome to learn from some Etruscan their
how the founding of the city in compliance with divine and the sacred books. He dug a circular pit "in the place that now is called
Comice 'and then he threw the first fruits of everything. The followers of Romulus, in
time, I threw a handful of their homeland. This grave - says Plutarch - was called by the Romans
mundus, the same word used to refer to the Olympus.
Plutarch goes on to say that the pit called the mundus was considered center of the valley
circular path around it with a plow pulled by an ox and a cow that had been yoked
; this vein was the perimeter of the city walls.
As the plow proceeded, the companions of Romulus followed him, collecting the loose and throwing clods
inside the path. When it came to the point where there would be due
the door, lifted the plow and left a space not affected by the groove:
for this reason the walls are sacred but the doors are not.
The second discrepancy concerns the foundation pit. Ovid agrees with Plutarch in
say that, after the auspices taken on the Palatine Hill, the original act the foundation ceremony of the
digging a pit in which they do not throw the first fruits of all kinds but Fruges (corn, put).
He said that the ditch is deep, get to solidum, namely the layer of rock beneath the surface of
soil, leaves out the detail of the handful of earth from different backgrounds, saying instead that the
pit, after being dug, it again filled and on it is erected an altar that represents a novus
focus.
The mundus of Plutarch is the same as the pit of Ovid?
Evidently the two accounts refer to the same passage of the ceremony
foundation but it is unclear whether this is the same thing, it is the grave of Ovid
filled her life after you have been laid Fruges (corn), while the bothros mentioned by Plutarch,
mundus precisely because it is defined, seems to remain as an empty underground space.
antiquarian sources rather than clarify the issue make it even more complicated, in fact
testimony of Varro, of Festus, see Macrobius to expand the area of semantic word
mundus, more precisely, we see the word doubles as an adjective of the first class
undus-a-um and a noun mundus-ia which they connect to
meanings so different from the doubt of being faced with a case of homophony: the dictionary-Meillet Ernout
suggests that there may be two or even three nouns in meaning and etymology
different.
No indication of antiquarian sources leads us to assimilate the mundus
foundation pit of a city, most of the information concentrates on the mysterious
Cereris mundus, where was the border between the world of the living and the dead, from which
the souls of the hands would sometimes exit to penetrate between the living and that sometimes, on certain very precise
, opened facilitating the descent of the living among the dead.
The grammarian Festus in his De verborum signification, a summary of the work of another
grammarian, the most famous Verrio Flacco, who lived in the Augustan age, writes: mundus appellatur
coelum, land, sea et aer
3. Mundus then as a synonym of Kosmos, which is the sense in which
the word is commonly used in Latin. But the word mundus
also indicates a place underground, with its vaulted ceiling in the likeness of the sky
, dedicated to the Manes and therefore normally closed, open only three times a year in
dates.
Festo, which is our main source of information in a passage very corrupt and therefore difficult to interpret
writes: Cereris here mundus appellatur here ... ter in Solet patere years. In this fragment
missing dates, but is retrieved by another fragment
dello stesso Festo: III kal sept, et III non october, et VI id. novemb….
Le vicissitudini della tradizione del testo del De significatione verborum ci ripropongono un
altro brano con maggiori informazioni:
ut ait Capito Ateius in lib. VII pontificali, ter in anno patere solet, diebus his : postridie
Volcanalia, ante diem tertium nonas octobris et ante diem VI id. nov. Qui quid ita dicatur
sic refert Cato in commentariis juris civilis : « Mundo nomen impositum est ab eo mundo,
qui supra nos est : forma enim ejus est, ut ex his qui intravere cognoscere potuit adsimilis
illae : ejus inferiorem partem veluti consecratam dis Manibus clausam omni tempore, nisi
his diebus qui supra scripti sunt, majores censuerunt habendam, quos dies etiam religiosos
judicaverunt ea de causa quod quo tempore quae occulta et abdita ea religionis deorum
Manium essent, veluti in lucem quamdam adducerentur, et patefierent, nihil eo tempore in
rep. geri voluerunt. Itaque per eos dies non cum hoste manus conserebant : non exercitus
scribehatur : non comitia habebantur : non aliud quicquam in rep. nisi quod ultima
necessitas admonebat, administrahatur.
Come dice Ateio Capitone nel settimo libro pontificale: solitamente
aperto tre volte all’anno nei seguenti giorni: dopo la festa dei Volcanalia (24 agosto), tre
giorni prima delle none di ottobre (5 ottobre), e sei giorni prima delle Ides of November (8
November). Why it is called in this way, the Cato says in his commentaries
civil law: "It has been called the world as one who is above our heads:
I had the chance to learn from those who have been admitted that its shape resembles him. Our
majority thinks that the mundus which is below ground were to be consecrated to the gods and
Hands should always be closed, except that in the days written on them. Our
also believed that those days were "religious", so they decided that in the days when
as it were taken in the light and made manifest the deep secrets of the religion of Mani
, not carrying out any attività pubblica. Pertanto in quei giorni non si attaccava
battaglia con il nemico, non si arruolavano soldati, non si tenevano comizi, non si faceva
nulla se non ciò che fosse strettamente necessario.
I divieti di cui parla Festo sono confermati da Macrobio (Sat. I 16-18) per mezzo di una
citazione di Varrone:
Nam cum Latiar, hoc est Latinarum sollemne, concipitur, item diebus Saturnaliorum,
sed et cum Mundus patet, nefas est praelium sumere: 17quia nec Latinarum tempore, quo
publice quondam induciae inter populum Romanum Latinosque firmatae sunt, inchoari
bellum decebat, nec Saturni festo, qui sine ullo tumultu bellico creditur imperasse, nec
patente Mundo, quod sacrum Diti patri et Proserpinae dicatum est: meliusque occlusa
Plutonis fauce eundum ad praelium putaverunt. 18Unde et Varro ita scribit: Mundus cum
patet, deorum tristium atque inferum quasi ianua patet: propterea non modo praelium
committi, verum etiam dilectum rei militaris causa habere, ac militem proficisci, navem
solvere, uxorem liberum quaerendorum causa ducere, religiosum est.
È vietato attaccare battaglia durante la festa di Giove Laziale, cioè durante le solenni
festività latine, nei giorni dei Saturnali e quando Mundus patet: nel periodo delle feste
latine perché un tempo in quei giorni era stata firmata una tregua fra il popolo dei Romani e
quello dei Latini, nei giorni dei Saturnali, because it is known that Saturn reigned in peace, when you open the
mundus, because this party is dedicated to Say Father and Proserpine.
it was felt it was best to go and fight when he closed the door of Pluto. For this reason
Varro writes: When the mundus pathetic, as it opens the door to the sad
underworld gods, so it is an impious thing to do but battle not only attack the military draft,
that the soldiers leave or ships salpino , to join his wife for having children.
final information about Festo there is still the closure of the underground mundus
devoted to the underworld:
manalem lapidem putabant they ostium Orci, for quod anime inferorum ad superos
manarent, qui dicuntur manes. Manalem vocabant lapidem etiam petram quamdam, quae
erat extra portam Capenam juxta aedem Martis, quam quum propter nimiam siccitatem in
Urbem pertraherent insequebatur pluvia statim, eumque, quod aquae manarent, manalem
lapidem dixere.
ritenevano che il lapis manalis fosse la porta dell’Orco, attraverso la quale le anime di
coloro che erano agli Inferi, dette Mani, penetravano nel mondo dei vivi. Si chiamava lapis
manalis anche una pietra collocata fuori della porta Capena, presso il tempio di Marte:
quando, in caso di siccità, questa pietra veniva condotta entro la città, aveva l’effetto di far
piovere immediatamente. Chiamavano this stone lapis Manalis because it was raining.
According to the definition of Festo is understood that the pencil Manalis
that caused the rain had nothing to do with the pencil Manalis which closed on the Orc, you can also
assume (without being certain) that ' opening of the mundus should be quite small, probably no bigger
the mouth of a well, if it could be closed with a lid
stone easily removable on certain occasions.
final information comes from Servius (Aen. 3, 134): Quidam aras superorum deorum
they volunt, id est medioximorum marinorum fiery, inferorum true mundus (some think that the
are to be exceeding their gods, the hearths of the intermediate and marine, is precisely the mundus
of the underworld)
Cereals Fruges, which according to Ovid are deposited in the grave, no doubt
can easily be linked with Ceres before being treated as Demeter, Ceres was the goddess of
growth and was identified with the earth mother
4, put his ears in the pit with
where the new city is rooted in the earth, could have many meanings, for example
ask the earth mother to exercise its power of germination to grow crops and to ensure
always the bread to the inhabitants of the new city. We could easily assume
the existence of a link between Ceres and the world of
dead, whether we think of this goddess in its most ancient goddess of growth, whether the
think through the filter of interpretatio graeca in the role of Demeter. In the first case
bond with the dead result of his chthonic nature, in accordance with the well-known events of
abduction of Persephone and Demeter his research by the warrant to the netherworld
its links with the underworld.
All this does not allow us to arrive at the threshold of that room from the underground vaults called mundus
Cereris, in fact we must assume too many intermediate steps
without anything concrete on which to base assumptions.
How to Plutarch, when he writes that the foundation pit, which he called in greek bothros,
is called by the Romans with the same word with which designate the Olympus
guide the interpretation of the meaning of the word to the first lines of Festo we have mentioned: mundus appellatur
coelum, land, sea et aer. Mundus then as the greek kosmos, Olympus as the collective name
indicating all that is between the surface of the earth and the sky and the sky with stars
that move in it.
It could be inferred that Plutarch is describing the foundation pit as a place
underground, covered by a vault-like blue, then We're saying that the pit was a mundus
foundation in the true sense of the word, perhaps he believed that the mundus
that was in the hole in the zone of Comice really corresponded to the foundation pit
diRoma
5
although most sources agree in describing the Palatine
precisely the area in front of the temple of Apollo, as the place where Romulus had founded Rome square of origins. The definition of square
Rome has given rise to many uncertainties of interpretation: Festo
6
says that comes from the shape of the Palatine, which is a square block of rock, while
7
Varro says that Rome was called a square because e to aequilibrium: flat?
in the form of regular square or rectangle?
In any case does not affect the shape of a square pit, which, as evidenced by the excavations of
which will be discussed later, certainly had a circular shape as Plutarch says, and its shape
may have favored the assimilation of the pit with a mundus.
On the meaning of the mandala in Sanskrit-is attested by tradition from
Satapatha Brahaman
12, is a noun that is accompanied by an adjective meaning "circular",
"round" like the noun meaning "hard" , "Rim", also as
sun and moon. The mandala is the magic circle that nell'abhicara
13
the magician on the ground in order to track
demarcate the space within which it operates spells, usually in relation to the world of
dead. Vittore Pisani
In conclusion we are not faced with two different homophonic words, indicating a
land and another showing the sky, but we are facing a single word meaning
earth, which indicates the dual elliptically heaven and land. According to Evans
not sure mundus is a word of Indo-European origin, could
belong, like other Latin words and Sanskrit, the substrate indomediterraneo, but the coincidence
area of meanings common among the Latin word mundus and the Sanskrit word mandala
help to understand the relationship between mundus and deaths. If the explanation of
Vittore Pisani left no room for doubt would dissolve the
suggestive ambiguity of a word that shows simultaneously two opposite, but if there were any doubt on the etymology of
mundus, would remain to explain the symbolic meaning
attached to an underground building built in the likeness of the heavens.
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