"A land that has no more legends," says the poet, "is condemned to die of cold." This may well be true. But a people without myths is already dead. The function of that particular class of legends known as myths is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives; not only to hold out to its conscience the values it recognizes and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all to express its very being and structure, the elements, the connections, the balances, the tensions that constitute it; to justify the rules and traditional practices without which everything within a society would disintegrate.
These myths may be of diverse types. With respect to their origin, some are drawn from authentic events and actions in a more or less stylized fashion, embellished, and set forth as examples to imitate; others are literary fictions incarnating important concepts of the ideology in certain personages and translating the relations between these concepts into the connections between various figures. With respect to their settings and to the cosmic dimensions of the scenes, some are located outside the narrow confines and the few centuries of national experience; they adorn a remote past or future and inaccessible zones where gods, giants, monsters, and demons have their sport; others are content with ordinary men, with familiar places, and with plausible eras. But all these narratives have one and the same vital function.
The comparative investigation of the oldest Indo-European civilizations which has been going on for about thirty years has had to take into account both this functional unity of the myths and this variety of mythic types. In particular, it at once became apparent that the Romans are not, after all, a people without mythology—as the textbooks, alas, still delight in characterizing them—but rather that, for them, mythology, and in fact a very ancient mythology in large part inherited from Indo-European times, while it has been destroyed at the level of theology, has prospered under the form of history. The test has been applied in several particularly important instances. The narratives and the types of personages, and the very structures of the traditions concerning these personages, which, either totally or in their essential features, were ascribed by the Indians and the Germans to the divine world, have been rediscovered in the Roman setting with the same structure and the same lesson, but ascribed exclusively to men, and to men who bear typical Roman names, belonging to authentic gentes. Roman ideology thus offers itself to the observer on two parallel planes which have only rare and narrow points of contact: on one level, a theology, neat and simple in every area of which we have any knowledge, defining abstractly, ordering a hierarchy, and, according to these definitions, setting up groups of powerful gods, but gods without adventures; on the other level, a history of origins tracing the significant adventures of men who, in their character and function, correspond to these gods.
Let us consider the central motif of Indo-European ideology, the conception according to which the world and society can live only through the harmonious collaboration of the three stratified functions of sovereignty, force, and fecundity. In India, this conception is expressed at once in divine and human terms, in a theological ensemble and an epic ensemble; but the gods no less than the heroes are portrayed as having colorful adventures, or at least as performing deeds or interventions which express their essences, their tasks, and their relations.
At the first level of Vedic theology, the two principal sovereign gods, Varuna, the all-powerful magician, and Mitra, the contract personified, have created and organized the worlds, with their plan and their overall mechanisms; at the second level, Indra, the physically powerful god, is engaged in a number of magnificent duels, conquests, and victories; at the third level, the twins Nasatya are the heroes of a whole series of brief but well-defined scenes, which continually bring into relief their qualities of bestowing health, youth, wealth, and happiness. A parallel is found in the epic material from the Mahdbhdrata, which became established only later but which has been shown by Stig Wikander1 to have prolonged a very ancient and partially pre-Vedic tradition; Pandu and his five putative sons, by their character and by their actions and adventures, develop the same ideology of the three functions: Pandu and the eldest of the Pandava, Yudhisthira, both of them kings in distinction from the others, incarnate the two aspects—Varunian and Mitrian—of sovereignty; the second and third Pandava, Bhima and Arjuna, incarnate two aspects—brutal and chivalrous—of the warrior's force which the Rig Veda brings together in the solitary Indra; the fourth and fifth sons, the twins Nakula and Sahadeva, incarnate several of the qualities of the divine twins: benevolence, humility, readiness to serve, and also skill in the breeding of cattle and horses.
India thus presents a double mythical expression of the trifunctional ideology, both in the adventures of her gods and in those of her heroes. The study of the connections between these two mythologies has only begun, but it is now known that, in part at least, they overlap. It was shown in 19542 that one of the Vedic exploits of the warrior god Indra, his duel with the Sun god, has a precise analogue in one of the epic exploits of the warrior hero Arjuna: just as Indra, in the duel, is the victor because he "detaches" or "pushes down" one of the wheels of the solar chariot, so Arjuna, the son of Indra, in the eighth book of the Mahdbhdrata, succeeds against Kama, son of the Sun, only because one of the wheels of the latter's chariot sinks itself miraculously into the ground. Five years later, the whole staff of sovereignty was similarly recognized as transposed into the figures of the king Yudhisthira, his father, and his two uncles.3
In the Roman context, another tableau, a documentation of another form, is evolved. Theologically, the three functions are well expressed and patronized, in their hierarchy, by the gods of the pre-Capitoline triad, those of the major flamens. But having observed that Jupiter and his variant Dius Fidius represent the two aspects of sovereignty, "power" and "law," that Mars is the strong warrior god, and that Quirinus expresses and guarantees directly, or serves through his flamen, certain important aspects of the third function (the social mass and vigilant peace; agricultural prosperity), one has exhausted what may be said about these divine figures. Their connection is to be found in their hierarchy, their entire being in their definitions, and these definitions leave no place for any narrative accounts.
In contrast, this dramatic unfolding of character, which is lacking to the gods, forms the very scaffolding of epic, of an epic—accepted as history by Titus Livius and by Plutarch, the former with reticence, the latter with devotion—the history of Rome's first kings. Here we have a sequential history, for Roman mythology has not assembled her " trifunctional heroes," like the Mahdbhdrata, into a group of contemporaries, of brothers hierarchized so that the first alone is king and the others his specialized auxiliaries. As seems to have very soon been the case in the Iranian epic also,4 Roman tradition has distributed them in time, in a succession of kings each of whom, by his character, his founding actions, his entire life, expresses and adds to the common undertaking one of the functions, or an aspect of one of the functions, necessary to the welfare of the society.
