A BUILDING SUPERSTITION.
SIG. LANCIANI, writing from Rome to the Athenæum in the number of October 7, 1882, says inter alia: “From the Esquiline we have two more instances of the peculiar practice, so thoroughly appreciated by our ancestors, of building foundation walls with statues and works of art. It seems that as soon as the trench was opened men were sent round to pick up as many statues as they could procure among the ruins of private and public buildings. The statues having been brought to the edge of the trench, the wholesale slaughter was accomplished. Small figures were hurled down entire; big ones were smashed and hammered and split into fragments. Between 1872 and 1882 not less than two hundred statues and busts have been found, on the Esquiline alone, buried in this way. As a rule every portion of them is recovered,” &c., &c.
These curious facts make it certain that the statues and busts were thus placed in the foundations of new buildings in ancient Rome with a clear and well-understood intention.
It is equally certain that they were at the same time of no technical use for pure building purposes.
If this be so, there could only have been one other purpose or object, viz., superstition; and this I think can be made perfectly probable.
Two or three years ago the Folk-Lore Record (vol. iii. p. 282) showed that the population of India believe at the present day that to give stability to new constructions a human being should be sacrificed and buried in the foundations. Precisely the same belief is entertained by the modern Roumanians, and the ancient Irish must have been convinced of the efficacy of this strange architectonic principle, as under the walls of two round towers (the only ones examined) human skeletons have been discovered.
