The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic

A word of explanation seems needed about the form this book has taken. Many years ago I became specially interested in the old Roman religion, chiefly, I think, through studying Plutarch’s Quaestiones Romanae, at a time when bad eyesight was compelling me to abandon a project for an elaborate study of all Plutarch’s works. The ‘scrappy’ character not only of the Quaestiones, but of all the material for the study of Roman ritual, suited weak eyes better than the continual reading of Greek text; but I soon found it necessary to discover a thread on which to hang these fragments in some regular order. This I naturally found in the Fasti as edited by Mommsen in the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum; and it gradually dawned on me that the only scientific way of treating the subject was to follow the calendar throughout the year, and to deal with each festival separately. I had advanced some way in this work, when Roscher’s Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology began to appear in parts, and at once convinced me that I should have to do my work all over again in the increased light afforded by the indefatigable industry of the writers of the Roman articles. I therefore dropped my work for several years while the Lexicon was in progress, and should have waited still longer for its completion, had not Messrs. Macmillan viiiinvited me to contribute a volume on the Roman religion to their series of Handbooks of Archaeology and Antiquities.

Having once set out on the plan of following the Fasti, I could not well abandon it, and I still hold it to be the only sound one: especially if, as in this volume, the object is to exhibit the religious side of the native Roman character, without getting entangled to any serious extent in the colluvies religionum of the last age of the Republic and the earlier Empire. The book has thus taken the form of a commentary on the Fasti, covering in a compressed form almost all the public worship of the Roman state, and including incidentally here and there certain ceremonies which strictly speaking lay outside that public worship. Compression has been unavoidable; yet it has been impossible to avoid stating and often discussing the conflicting views of eminent scholars; and the result probably is that the book as a whole will not be found very interesting reading. But I hope that British and American students of Roman history and literature, and possibly also anthropologists and historians of religion, may find it useful as a book of reference, or may learn from it where to go for more elaborate investigations.

The task has often been an ungrateful one—one indeed of

The more carefully I study any particular festival, the more (at least in many cases) I have been driven into doubt and difficulty both as to reported facts and their interpretation. Had the nature of the series permitted it, I should have wished to print the chief passages quoted from ancient authors in full, as was done by ixMr. Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States, and so to present to the reader the actual material on which conclusions are rightly or wrongly based. I have only been able to do this where it was indispensable: but I have done my best to verify the correctness of the other references, and have printed in full the entries of the ancient calendars at the head of each section. Professor Gardner, the editor of the series, has helped me by contributing two valuable notes on coins, which will be found at the end of the volume: and I hope he may some day find time to turn his attention more closely to the bearing of numismatic evidence on Roman religious history.

It happens, by a curious coincidence, that I am writing this on the last day of the old Roman year; and the lines which Ovid has attached to that day may fitly express my relief on arriving at the end of a very laborious task:

W. W. F.

Oxford: Feb. 28, 1899.

The following are the most important abbreviations which occur in the notes:

C. I. L. stands for Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Where the volume is not indicated the reference is invariably to the second edition of that part of vol. i which contains the Fasti (Berlin, 1893).

Marquardt or Marq. stands for the third volume of Marquardt’s Römische Staatsverwaltung, second edition, edited by Wissowa (Berlin, 1885). It is the sixth volume of the complete Handbuch der Römischen Alterthümer of Mommsen and Marquardt.

Preller, or Preller-Jordan, stands for the third edition of Preller’s Römische Mythologie by H. Jordan (Berlin, 1881).

Myth. Lex. or Lex. stands for the Ausführliches Lexicon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie, edited by W. H. Roscher, which as yet has only been completed to the letter N.

Festus, or Paulus, stands for K. O. Müller’s edition of the fragments of Festus, De Significatione Verborum, and the Excerpta ex Festo of Paulus Diaconus; quoted by the page.

There are three ways in which the course of the year may be calculated. It can be reckoned—

1. By the revolution of the moon round the earth, twelve of which = 354 days, or a ring (annus), sufficiently near to the solar year to be a practicable system with modifications.

2. By the revolution of the earth round the sun i. e. 365-1/4 days; a system which needs periodical adjustments, as the odd quarter (or, more strictly, 5 hours 48 minutes 48 seconds) cannot of course be counted in each year. In this purely solar year the months are only artificial divisions of time, and not reckoned according to the revolutions of the moon. This is our modern system.

3. By combining in a single system the solar and lunar years as described above. This has been done in various ways by different peoples, by adopting a cycle of years of varying length, in which the resultants of the two bases of calculation should be brought into harmony as nearly as possible. In 2other words, though the difference between a single solar year and a single lunar year is more than 11 days, it is possible, by taking a number of years together and reckoning them as lunar years, one or more of them being lengthened by an additional month, to make the whole period very nearly coincide with the same number of solar years. Thus the Athenians adopted for this purpose at different times groups or cycles of 8 and 19 years. In the Octaeteris or 8-year cycle there were 99 lunar months, 3 months of 30 days being added in 3 of the 8 years—a plan which falls short of accuracy by about 36 hours. Later on a cycle of 19 years was substituted for this, in which the discrepancy was greatly reduced. The Roman year in historical times was calculated on a system of this kind, though with such inaccuracy and carelessness as to lose all real relation to the revolutions both of earth and moon.

But there was a tradition that before this historical calendar came into use there had been another system, which the Romans connected with the name of Romulus. This year was supposed to have consisted of 10 months, of which 4—March, May, July, October—had 31 days, and the rest 30; in all 304. But this was neither a solar nor a lunar year; for a lunar year of 10 months = 295 days 7 hours 20 minutes, while a solar year = 365-1/4. Nor can it possibly be explained as an attempt to combine the two systems. Mommsen has therefore conjectured that it was an artificial year of 10 months, used in business transactions, and in periods of mourning, truces^[2], &c., to remedy the uncertainty of the primitive calculation of time; and that it never really was the basis of a state calendar. This view has of course been the subject of much criticism^[3]. But no better solution has been found; the hypothesis that the year of 10 months was a real lunar year, to which an undivided period of time was added at each year’s end, to make it correspond with the solar year and the seasons, has not much to recommend it or any analogy among other peoples. It was not, then, the so-called year of Romulus which was the basis of the earliest state-calendar, but another system which the Romans themselves 3usually ascribed to Numa. This was originally perhaps a lunar year; at any rate the number of days in it is very nearly that of a true lunar year (354 days 8 hours 48 minutes)^[4]. It consisted of 12 months, of which March, May, July, October had 31 days, and the rest 29, except February, which had 28. All the months therefore had an odd number of days, except the one which was specially devoted to purification and the cult of the dead; according to an old superstition, probably adopted from the Greeks of Southern Italy^[5], that odd numbers were of good omen, even numbers of ill omen. This principle, as we shall see, holds good throughout the Roman calendar.

But this reckoning of the year, if it ever existed at all, could not have lasted long as it stood. As we know it in historical times, it has become modified by applying to it the principle of the solar year. The reason for this should be noted carefully. A lunar year, being about 11 days short of the solar year, would in a very short time become out of harmony with the seasons. Now if there is one thing certain about the Roman religious calendar, it is that many at least of its oldest festivals mark those operations of husbandry on which the population depended for its subsistence, and for the prosperous result of which divine agencies must be propitiated. These festivals, when fixed in the calendar, must of course occur at the right seasons, which could not be the case if the calendar were that of a purely lunar year. It was therefore necessary to work in the solar principle; and this was done^[6] by a somewhat rude expedient, not unlike that of the Athenian Octaeteris, and probably derived from it^[7]. A cycle of 4 years was devised, of which the first had the 355 days of the lunar year, the second 355 + 22, the third 355 again, 4and the fourth 355 + 23. The extra periods of 22 and 23 days were inserted in February, not at the end, but after the 23rd (Terminalia)^[8]. The total number of days in the cycle was 1465, or about 1 day too much in each year; and in course of time even this system got out of harmony with the seasons and had to be rectified from time to time by the Pontifices, who had charge of the calendar. Owing to ignorance on their part, misuse or neglect of intercalation had put the whole system out of gear before the last century of the Republic. All relation to sun and moon was lost; the calendar, as Mommsen says, ‘went on its own way tolerably unconcerned about moon and sun.’ When Caesar took the reform of the calendar in hand the discrepancy between it and the seasons was very serious; the former being in advance of the latter probably by some weeks. Caesar, aided by the mathematician Sosigenes, put an end to this confusion by extending the year 46 B.C. to 445 days, and starting afresh on Jan. 1, 45 B.C.^[9]—a day henceforward to be that of the new year—with a cycle of 4 years of 365 days^[10]; in the last of which a single day was added, after the Terminalia. This cycle produced a true solar year with a slight adjustment at short intervals; and after a few preliminary blunders on the part of the Pontifices, lasted without change until A.D. 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII set right a slight discrepancy by a fresh regulation. This regulation was only adopted in England in 1752, and is still rejected in Russia and by the Greek Church generally.

That the Roman year originally began with March is certain^[11], not only from the evidence of the names of the months, which after June are reckoned as 5th (Quinctilis), 6th (Sextilis), and so on, but from the nature of the March festivals, as will be shown in treating of that month. In the character of the religious festivals there is a distinct break between February and March, and the operations both of nature and of man take a fresh turn at that point. Between the festivals of December and those of January there is no such break. No doubt January 1, just after the winter solstice, was even at an early time considered in some sense as a beginning; but it is going too far to assume, as some have done, that an ancient religious or priestly year began at that point^[12]. It was not on January 1, but on March 1, that the sacred fire in the Aedes Vestae was renewed and fresh laurels fixed up on the Regia, the two buildings which were the central points of the oldest Roman religion^[13]. March 1, which in later times at least was considered the birthday of the special protecting deity of the Romans, continued to be the Roman New Year’s Day long after the official beginning of the year had been changed to January 1^[14]. It was probably not till 153 B.C., when the consuls began to enter on office on January 1, that this official change took place; and the date was then adopted, not so much for religious reasons as because it was convenient, when the business of administration was increasing, to have the consuls in Rome for some time before they left for their provinces at the opening of the war season in March.

No rational account can in my opinion be given of the Roman religious calendar of the Republic unless it be taken as beginning with March; and in this work I have therefore restored the old order of months. With the Julian calendar I am not concerned; though it is unfortunate that all the 6Roman calendars we possess, including the Fasti of Ovid, date from after the Julian era, and therefore present us with a distorted view of the true course of the old Roman worship.

Next after March came Aprilis, the month of opening or unfolding vegetation; then Maius, the month of growing, and Junius, that of ripening and perfecting. After this the names cease to be descriptive of the operations of nature; the six months that follow were called, as four of them still are, only by their positions relative to March, on which the whole system of the year thus turned as on a pivot.

The last two months of the twelve were January and February. They stand alone among the later months in bearing names instead of mere numbers, and this is sufficient to suggest their religious importance. That they were not mere appendages to a year of ten months is almost certain from the antique character of the rites and festivals which occur in them—Agonia, Carmentalia, Lupercalia, &c.; and it is safer to consider them as marking an ancient period of religious importance preparatory to the beginning of the year, and itself coinciding with the opening of the natural year after the winter solstice. This latter point seems to be indicated in the name Januarius, which, whether derived from janua, ‘a gate,’ or Janus, ‘the god of entrances,’ is appropriate to the first lengthening of the days, or the entrance of the sun on a new course; while February, the month of purifying or regenerative agencies (februa), was, like the Lent of the Christian calendar, the period in which the living were made ready for the civil and religious work of the coming year, and in which also the yearly duties to the dead were paid.

It is as well here to refer to a passage of Ovid (Fasti, ii. 47 foll.), itself probably based on a statement of Varro, which has led to a controversy about the relative position of these two months:

7This plainly means that from the time when March ceased to be the first month, the year always began with January and ended with February; in other words the order was January, March, April, and so on, ending with February; until the time of the Decemvirate, when February became the second month, and December the last, as at present, January still retaining its place. A little consideration of Ovid’s lines will, however, suggest the conclusion that he, and his authority, whoever that may have been, were arguing aetiologically rather than on definite knowledge. January, they thought, must always have been the first month, because janua, ‘a door,’ is the first thing, the entrance, through which you pass into a new year as into a house or a temple. How, they would argue, could a month thus named have ever been the eleventh month? This once supposed impossible, it was necessary to infer that the place of January was the first, from the time of its introduction, and that it was followed by March, April, &c., February coming last of all, immediately after December; and finally that at the time of the Decemvirs, who are known to have made some alterations in the calendar, the positions of January and February were reversed, January remaining the first month, but February becoming the second.

The Romans, with their usual conservatism, preserved the shell of the lunar system of reckoning long after the reality had disappeared. The month was at all times divided by the real or imaginary phases of the moon, though a week of eight days was introduced at an early period, and though the month was no longer a lunar one.

The two certain points in a lunar month are the first appearance of the crescent^[15] and the full moon; between these is the point when the moon reaches the first quarter, which is a less certain one. Owing to this uncertainty of the reckoning of the first days of the month there were no festivals in the calendars on the days before the first quarter (Nones), with a single exception of the obscure Poplifugia on July 5. The day of 8the new moon was called Kalendae, as Varro tells us, ‘quod his diebus calantur eius mensis nonae a pontificibus, quintanae an septimanae sint futurae, in Capitolio in curia Calabra sic: Dies te quinque calo, Iuno Covella. Septem dies te calo Iuno Covella’^[16]. All the Kalends were sacred to Juno, whose connexion with the moon is certain though not easy to explain.

With the Nones, which were sacred to no deity, all uncertainty ceased. The Ides, or day of the full moon, was always the eighth after the first quarter. This day was sacred to Jupiter; a fact which is now generally explained as a recognition of the continuous light of the two great heavenly bodies during the whole twenty-four hours^[17]. On the Nones the Rex sacrorum (and therefore before him the king himself) announced the dates of the festivals for the month.

There was another internal division of the month, with which we are not here specially concerned, that of the Roman week or nundinal period of eight days, which is indicated in all the calendars by the letters A to H. The nundinae were market days, on which the rustic population came into Rome; whether they were also feast days (feriae) was a disputed question even in antiquity.

Every day in the Roman calendar has a certain mark attached to it, viz. the letters F, C, N, NP, EN, Q.R.C.F., Q.St.D.F., or FP. All of these have a religious significance, positive or negative.

F, i. e. fas or fastus, means that on the day so marked civil and especially judicial business might be transacted without fear of divine displeasure^[18]. Correctness in the time as well as place of all human actions was in the mind of the early Roman of the most vital importance; and the floating traditional ideas which governed his life before the formation of the State were 9systematized and kept secret by kings and priests, as a part, so to speak, of the science of government. Not till B.C. 304 was the calendar published, with its permissive and prohibitive regulations^[19].

C (comitialis) means that the day so marked was one on which the comitia might meet^[20], and on which also legal business might be transacted, as on the days marked F, if there were no other hindrance. The total number of days thus available for secular business, i.e. days marked F and C, was in the Julian calendar 239 out of 365.

N, i. e. nefastus, meant that the day so marked was religiosus, vitiosus, or ater; as Gellius has it^[21], ‘tristi omine et infames impeditique, in quibus et res divinas facere et rem quampiam novam exordiri temperandum est.’ Some of these days received the mark in historical times for a special reason, e. g. a disaster to the State; among these were the postriduani or days following the Kalends, Nones and Ides, because two terrible defeats had occurred on such days^[22]. But most of them (in all they are 57) were probably so marked as being devoted to lustrations, or worship of the dead or of the powers of the earth, and therefore unsuitable for worldly business. One long series of such dies nefasti occurs Feb. 1-14, the time of purification; another, April 5-22, in the month occupied by the rites of deities of growing vegetation; a third, June 5-14, when the rites of the Vestals preparatory to harvest were taking place; and a fourth, July 1-9, for reasons which are unfortunately by no means clear to us.

NP was not a mark in the pre-Julian calendars, for it was apparently unknown to Varro and Ovid. Verrius Flaccus seems to have distinguished it from N, but his explanation is mutilated, even as it survives in Festus^[23]. No one has yet determined for certain the origin of the sign, and discussion of the various conjectures would be here superfluous^[24]. It appears 10to distinguish, in the Julian calendars, those days on which fell the festivals of deities who were not of an earthly and therefore doubtful character from those marked N. Thus in the series of dies nefasti in February and April the Ides in each case have the mark NP as being sacred to Jupiter.

EN. We have a mutilated note in the calendar of Praeneste which indicates what this abbreviation meant, viz. endotercisus = intercisus, i. e. ‘cut into parts’^[25]. In morning and evening, as Varro tells us, the day was nefastus, but in the middle, between the slaying of the victim and the placing of the entrails upon the altar, it was fastus. But why eight days in the calendar were thus marked we do not know, and have no data for conjecturing. All the eight were days coming before some festival, or before the Ides. Of the eight two occur in January and two in February, the others in March, August, October and December. But on such facts no conjectures can be built.

Q.R.C.F. (Quando Rex Comitiavit Fas) will be explained under March 24; the only other day on which it occurs is May 24. Q.St.D.F. (Quando stercus delatum fas) only occurs on June 15, and will there be fully dealt with.

FP occurs thrice, but only in three calendars. Feb. 21 (Feralia) is thus marked in Caer.^[26], but is F in Maff. April 23 (Vinalia) is FP in Caer. but NP in Maff. and F in Praen. Aug. 19 (Vinalia rustica) is FP in Maff. and Amit, F in Antiat. and Allif., NP in Vall. Mommsen explains FP as fastus principio, i. e. the early part of the day was fastus, and suggests that in the case of the Feralia, as the rites of the dead were performed at night, there was no reason why the earlier part of the day should be nefastus. But in the case of the two Vinalia we can hardly even guess at the meaning of the mark, and it does not seem to have been known to the Romans themselves.

The basis of our knowledge of the old Roman religious year is to be found in the fragments of calendars which still survive. None of these indeed is older than the Julian era; and all but one are mere fragments. But from the fragments and the one almost perfect calendar we can infer the character of the earlier calendar with tolerable certainty.

The calendar, as the Romans generally believed, was first published by Cnaeus Flavius, curule aedile, in 304 B.C., who placed the fasti conspicuously in the Forum, in order that every one might know on what days legal business might be transacted^[27]; in other words, a calendar was published with the marks of the days and the indications of the festivals. After this we hear nothing until 189 B.C., when a consul, M. Fulvius Nobilior, adorned his temple of Hercules and the Muses with a calendar which contained explanations or notes as well as dates^[28]. These are the only indications we have of the way in which the pre-Julian calendar was made known to the people.

But the rectification of the calendar by Julius, and the changes then introduced, brought about a multiplication of copies of the original one issued under the dictator’s edict^[29]. Not only in Rome, but in the municipalities round about her, where the ancient religious usage of each city had since the enfranchisement of Italy been superseded, officially at least, by that of Rome, both public and private copies were made and set up either on stone, or painted on the walls or ceiling of a building.

Of such calendars we have in all fragments of some thirty, and one which is all but complete. Fourteen of these fragments were found in or near Rome, eleven in municipalities 12such as Praeneste, Caere, Amiternum, and others as far away as Allifae and Venusia; four are of uncertain origin^[30]; and one is a curious fragment from Cisalpine Gaul^[31]. Most of them are still extant on stone, but for a few we have to depend on written copies of an original now lost^[32]. No day in the Roman year is without its annotation in one or more of these; the year is almost complete, as I have said, in the Fasti Maffeiani; and several others contain three or four months nearly perfect^[33]. Two, though in a fragmentary condition, are of special interest. One of these, that of the ancient brotherhood of the Fratres Arvales, discovered in 1867 and following years in the grove of the brethren near Rome, contains some valuable additional notes in the fragments which survive of the months from August to November. The other, that of Praeneste, containing January, March, April and parts of February and December, is still more valuable from the comments it contains, most of which we can believe with confidence to have come from the hand of the great Augustan scholar Verrius Flaccus. We are told by Suetonius that Verrius put up a calendar in the forum at Praeneste^[34], drawn up by his own hand; and the date^[35] and matter of these fragments found at Praeneste agree with what we know of the life and writings of Verrius. It is unlucky that recent attempts to find additional fragments should have been entirely without result; for the whole annotated calendar, if we possessed it, would probably throw light on many dark corners of our subject.

To these fragments of Julian calendars, all drawn up between B.C. 31 and A.D. 46, there remain to be added two in MSS.: (i) that of Philocalus, A.D. 354, (ii) that of Polemius Silvius, A.D. 448; neither of which are of much value for our present purpose, though they will be occasionally referred to. Lastly, we have two farmer’s almanacs on cubes 13of bronze, which omit the individual days, but are of use as showing the course of agricultural operations under the later Empire^[36].

All these calendars, some of which had been printed wholly or in part long ago, while a few have only been discovered of late, have been brought together for the first time in the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, edited by Mommsen with all his incomparable skill and learning, and furnished with ample elucidations and commentaries. And we now have the benefit of a second edition of this by the same editor, to whose labours in this as in every other department of Roman history it is almost impossible to express our debt in adequate words. All references to the calendars in the following pages will be made to this second edition.

A word remains to be said about the Fasti of Ovid^[37], which is a poetical and often fanciful commentary on the calendar of the first half of the Julian year, i.e. January to June inclusive; each month being contained in one book. Ovid tells us himself^[38] that he completed the year in twelve books; but the last six were probably never published, for they are never quoted by later writers. The first six were written but not published before the poet’s exile, and taken in hand again after the death of Augustus, but only the first book had been revised when the work was cut short by Ovid’s death.

Ovid’s work merits all praise as a literary performance, for the neatness and felicity of its versification and diction; but as a source of knowledge it is too much of a medley to be used without careful criticism. There is, however, a great deal in it that helps us to understand the views about the gods and their worship, not only of the scholars who pleased themselves and Augustus by investigating these subjects, but also of the common people both in Rome and in the country. But the value varies greatly throughout the work. Where the poet describes some bit of ritual which he has himself seen, or tells 14some Italian story he has himself heard, he is invaluable; but as a substitute for the work of Varro on which he drew, he only increases our thirst for the original. No great scholar himself, he aimed at producing a popular account of the results of the work of scholars, picking and choosing here and there as suited his purpose, and not troubling himself to write with scientific accuracy. Moreover, he probably made free use of Alexandrine poets, and especially of Callimachus, whose Aetia is in some degree his model for the whole poem; and thus it is that the work contains a large proportion of Greek myth, which is often hard to distinguish from the fragments of genuine Italian legend which are here and there imbedded in it. Still, when all is said, a student of the Roman religion should be grateful to Ovid; and when after the month of June we lose him as a companion, we may well feel that the subject not only loses with him what little literary interest it can boast of, but becomes for the most part a mere investigation of fossil rites, from which all life and meaning have departed for ever.

All the calendars still surviving belong, as we saw, to the early Empire, and represent the Fasti as revised by Julius. But what we have to do with is the calendar of the Republic. Can it be recovered from those we still possess? Fortunately this is quite an easy task, as Mommsen himself has pointed out^[39]; we can reconstruct for certain the so-called calendar of Numa as it existed throughout the Republican era. The following considerations must be borne in mind:

1. It is certain that Caesar and his advisers would alter the familiar calendar as little as possible, acting in the spirit of persistent conservatism from which no true Roman was ever free. They added 10 days to the old normal year of 355 days, i. e. two at the end of January, August, and December, and one at the end of April, June, September, and November; but they retained the names of the months, and their division by Kalends, Nones, and Ides, and also the signs of the days, 15and the names of all festivals throughout the year. Later on further additions were made, chiefly in the way of glorification of the Emperors and their families; but the skeleton remained as it had been under the Republic.

2. It is almost certain that the Republican calendar itself had never been changed from its first publication down to the time of Caesar. There is no historical record of any alteration, either by the introduction of new festivals or in any other way. The origin of no festival is recorded in the history of the Republic, except the second Carmentalia, the Saturnalia, and the Cerealia^[40]; and in these three cases we can be morally certain that the record, if such it can be called, is erroneous.

3. If Julius and his successors altered only by slight additions, and if the calendar which they had to work on was of great antiquity and unchanged during the Republic, how, in the next place, are we to distinguish the skeleton of that ancient calendar from the Julian and post-Julian additions? Nothing is easier; in Mommsen’s words, it is not a matter of calculation; a glance at the Fasti is sufficient. In all these it will be seen that the numbers, names, and signs of the days were cut or painted in large capital letters; while ludi, sacrifices, and all additional notes and comments appear in small capital letters. It cannot be demonstrated that the large capital letters represent the Republican calendar; but the circumstantial evidence, so to speak, is convincing. For inscribed in these large capitals is all the information which the Roman of the Republic would need; the dies fasti, comitiales, nefasti, &c.; the number of the days in the month; the position of the Nones and the Ides and the names of those days on which fixed festivals took place; all this in an abbreviated but no doubt familiar form. The minor sacrificial rites, which concerned the priests and magistrates rather than the people, he did not find there; they would only have confused him. The moveable festivals, too, he did not find there, as they changed their date from year to year and were fixed by the priesthood as the time for each came round. The ludi, or public games, were also absent from the old calendar, for they were, originally at least, only adjuncts to certain 16festivals out of which they had grown in course of time. Lastly, all rites which did not technically concern the State as a whole, but only its parts and divisions^[41], i. e. of gentes and curiae, of pagi (paganalia), montes (Septimontium) and sacella (Sacra Argeorum), could not be included in the public calendar of the Roman people.

But the Roman of the Republic, even if his calendar were confined to the indications given by the large capital letters in the Julian calendar, could find in these the essential outline of the yearly round of his religious life. This outline we too can reconstruct, though the detail is often wholly beyond our reach. For this detail we have to fall back upon other sources of information, which are often most unsatisfactory and difficult to interpret. What are these other sources, of what value are they, and how can that value be tested?

Apart from the surviving Fasti, we have to depend, both for the completion of the religious calendar, and for the study and interpretation of all its details, chiefly on the fragmentary remains of the works of the two great scholars of the age of Julius and Augustus, viz. Varro and Verrius Flaccus, and on the later grammarians, commentators, and other writers who drew upon their voluminous writings. Varro’s book de Lingua Latina, though not complete, is in great part preserved, and contains much information taken from the books of the pontifices, which, did we but possess them, would doubtless constitute our one other most valuable record besides the Fasti themselves^[42]. Such, too, is the value of the dictionary of Verrius Flaccus, which, though itself lost, survives in the form of two series of condensed excerpts, made by Festus probably in the second century, A.D., and by Paulus Diaconus as late as the beginning of the ninth^[43]. Much of the work of Varro and Verrius is also imbedded in the grammatical writings of Servius the commentator on Virgil, in Macrobius, Nonius, Gellius, and 17many others, and also in Pliny’s Natural History, and in some of the Christian Fathers, especially St. Augustine and Tertullian; but all these need to be used with care and caution, except where they quote directly from one or other of their two great predecessors. The same may be said of Laurentius Lydus^[44], who wrote in Greek a work de Mensibus in the sixth century, which still survives. To these materials must be added the great historical writers of the Augustine age; Livy, who, uncritical as he was, and incapable of distinguishing the genuine Italian elements in religious tradition from the accretions of Greek and Graeco-Etruscan myth, yet supplies us with much material for criticism; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who as a foreigner resident for some time in Rome, occasionally describes ritual of which he was himself a witness. The Roman lives of Plutarch, and his curious collection entitled Roman Questions, also contain much interesting matter, taken from several sources, e.g. Juba, the learned king of Mauritania, but as a rule ultimately referable to Varro. Beyond these there is no one author of real importance; but the ‘plant’ of the investigator will include of course the whole of Roman literature, and Greek literature so far as it touches Roman life and history. Of epigraphical evidence there is not much for the period of the Republic, beyond the fragments of the Fasti; by far the most valuable Italian religious inscription is not Roman but Umbrian; and the Acta Fratrum Arvalium only begin with the Empire. Yet from these^[45], and from a few works of art, however hard of interpretation, some light has occasionally been thrown upon the difficulties of our subject; and the study of early Italian culture is fast progressing under the admirable system of excavation now being supervised by the Italian government.

All this material has been collected, sifted, and built upon by modern scholars, and chiefly by Germans. The work of collecting was done to a great extent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rest of the process mainly in the 18nineteenth. The chief writers will be quoted as occasion demands; here can only be mentioned, honoris causa, the writings of Ambrosch, Preller, Schwegler, Marquardt^[46], and of some of the writers in the Mythological Lexicon, edited by Roscher, especially Professor Wissowa of Berlin, whose short but pithy articles, as well as his treatises de Feriis and de Dis Indigetibus are models of scholarly investigation^[47]. Of late, too, anthropologists and folk-lorists have had something to say about Roman religious antiquities; of these, the most conspicuous is the late lamented Dr. Mannhardt, who applied a new method to certain problems both of the Greek and the Roman religion, and evolved a new theory for their interpretation. Among other works of this kind, which incidentally throw light on our difficulties, the most useful to me have been those of Professor Tylor, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Andrew Lang, and the late Professor Robertson Smith. In the Religion of the Semites, by the last named scholar, I seem to see a deeper insight into the modes of religious thought of ancient peoples than in any other work with which I am acquainted.

Yet in spite of all this accumulation of learning and acumen, it must be confessed that the study of the oldest Roman religion is still one of insuperable difficulty, and apt to try the patience of the student all the more as he slowly becomes aware of the conditions of the problem before him. There are festivals in the calendar about which we really know nothing at all, and must frankly confess our ignorance; there are others about which we know just enough to be doubtful; others again, in interpreting which the Romans themselves plainly went astray, leaving us perhaps nothing but a baseless legend to aid us in guessing their original nature. It must be borne in mind that the Roman religion was in ruins when the Julian calendar was drawn up, and that the archaeological research which was brought to bear upon it by Varro and Verrius was not of a strictly scientific character. And during 19the last two centuries of the Republic, as the once stately building crumbled away, it became overlaid with growths of foreign and especially of Greek origin, under which it now lies hopelessly buried. The ground-plan alone remains, in the form of the calendar as it has been explained above; to this we must hold fast if we would obtain any true conception of the religion of the earliest Roman State^[48]. Here and there some portion of the building of which it was the basis can however still be conjecturally restored by the aid of Varro and Verrius and a few other ancient writers, tested by the criticism of modern scholars, and sometimes by the results of the science of comparative religion. Such particular restoration is what has been attempted in this work, not without much misgiving and constant doubt.

The fall of the Republic is in any case a convenient point from which to survey the religious ideas and practice of the conquerors of the civilized world. It is not indeed a more significant epoch in the history of the Roman religion than the era of the Punic wars, when Rome ceased to be a peninsular, and began to be a cosmopolitan state; but it is a turning-point in the history of the calendar and of religious worship as well as of the constitution. Henceforward, in spite of the strenuous efforts of Augustus to revive the old forms of worship, all religious rites have a tendency to become transformed or overshadowed, first by the cult of the Caesars^[49]; secondly, by the steadily increasing influence of foreign and especially of Oriental cults; and lastly, by Christianity itself^[50].

Taking our stand, then, in the year 46 B.C., the last year of the pre-Julian calendar, we are able in a small volume, by carefully working through that calendar, to lay a firm foundation of material for the study of the religious life and thought of the Roman people while it was still in some sense really Roman. The plan has indeed its disadvantages; it excludes the introduction of a systematic account of certain departments of the subject, such as the development of the priesthoods, the sacrificial ritual, the auspicia, and the domestic 20practice of religious rites^[51]. But if it is true, as it undoubtedly is, that in dealing with the Roman religion we must begin with the cult^[52], and that for the cult the one ‘sincerum documentum’ is to be found in the surviving Fasti, these drawbacks may fairly be deemed to be counterbalanced by distinct advantages. And in order to neutralize any bewilderment that may be caused by the constant variety of the rites we shall meet with, both in regard to their origin, history, and meaning, some attempt will be made, when we have completed the round of the year, to sum up our results, to sketch in outline the history of Roman religious ideas, and to estimate the influence of all this elaborate ceremonial on the life and character of the Roman people.

In order to fit the calendar of each month into a single page of this work it has been necessary to print the names of the festivals, and the indications of Kalends, Nones, &c. in small capital letters instead of the large capitals in which they appear in the originals (see above, p. 15). In the headings to the days as they occur throughout the book the method of the originals will be reproduced exactly, i. e. large capitals represent in every case the most ancient calendar of the Republic, and small capitals the additamenta ex fastis.

The mensis Martius stands alone among the Roman months. Not only was it the first in matters both civil and religious down to the time of Julius Caesar, but it is more closely associated with a single deity than any other, and that deity the protector and ancestor of the legendary founder of the city. It bears too the name of the god, which is not the case with any other month except January; and it is less certain that January was named after Janus than that March was named after Mars. The cult of Janus is not specially obvious in January except on a single day; but the cult of Mars is paramount all through March, and gives a peculiar character to the month’s worship.

It follows on a period which we may call one of purification, or the performance of piacular duties towards dead ancestors and towards the gods; and this has itself succeeded a time of general festivity in the homestead, the group of homesteads, the market, and the cross-roads. The rites of December and January are for the most part festive and social, those of February mystic and melancholy—characteristics which have their counterpart in the Christian Christmas, New Year, and Lent. The rites of March are distinct from those of either period, as we shall see. They again are followed by those of April, the opening month, which are gay and apt to be licentious; then comes the mensis Maius or month of growth, which is a time of peril for the crops, and has a certain character of doubt and darkness in its rites; lastly comes June, the month of maturity, when harvest is close at hand, and life 34begins to brighten up once more. After this the Roman months cease to denote by their names those workings of nature on which the husbandman’s fortune for the year depends.

By a process of elimination we can make a guess at the kind of ideas which must have been associated with the month which the Romans called Martius, even before examining its rites in detail. It is the time when the spring, whose first breath has been felt in February, begins to show its power upon the land^[61]. Some great numen is at work, quickening vegetation, and calling into life the powers of reproduction in man and the animals. The way in which this quickening Power or Spirit was regarded by primitive man has been very carefully investigated of recent years, and though the variation is endless both in myth and in ritual, we may now safely say that he was looked on as coming to new life after a period of death, or as returning after an absence in the winter, or as conquering the hostile powers that would hinder his activity. Among civilized peoples these ideas only survive in legend or poetry, or in some quaint bit of rural custom, often semi-dramatic, which may or may not have found its way into the organized cults of a city state of Greece or Italy, or even into the calendar of a Christian Church. But when these survivals have been collected in vast numbers both from modern Europe and from classical antiquity, and compared with the existing ideas and practices of savage peoples, they can leave no doubt in our minds as to the general character of the primitive 35husbandman’s conception of the mysterious power at work in spring-time.

It was this Power, we can hardly doubt, that the Latins knew by the name of Mars, the god whose cult is so prominent throughout the critical period of the quickening processes. We know him in Roman literature as a full-grown deity, with characteristics partly taken from the Greeks, partly extended and developed by a state priesthood and the usage of a growing and cosmopolitan city. We cannot trace him back, step by step, to his earliest vague form as an undefined Spirit, Power, or numen; it is very doubtful whether we can identify him, as mythologists have often done, with anything so obvious and definite as the sun, which by itself does not seem to have been held responsible by primitive peoples for the workings of nature at this time of year. We do not even know for certain the meaning of his name, and can get no sure help from comparative philology. Nevertheless there is a good deal of cumulative evidence which suggests a comparatively humble origin for this great god, some points of which we shall meet with in studying his cult during the month. The whole subject has been worked up by Roscher in the article on Mars in his Mythological Lexicon, which has the great advantage of being based on an entire re-examination of the Mars-cult, which he had handled in an earlier essay on Apollo and Mars.

FERIAE MARTI. (PRAEN.)
N̄ MARTIS. (PHILOC.)
IUN[O]NI LUCINAE E[S]QUILIIS QUOD EO DIE AEDES EI [DEDICA]TA EST PER MATRONAS QUAM VOVERAT ALBI[NIA] ... VEL UXOR ... SI PUERUM ... [AT]QUE IPSA[M].... (PRAEN.)

This was the New Year’s day of the Roman religious calendar. From Macrobius^[62] we learn that in his day the sacred fire of Vesta was now renewed, and fresh laurels fixed on the Regia, the Curiae, and the houses of the flamens; the custom therefore was kept up long after the first of March had ceased to be the 36civil New Year. Ovid alludes to the same rites, and adds the Aedes Vestae as also freshly decorated^[63]:

The mention of these buildings carries us back to the very earliest Rome, when the rex and his sons and daughters^[64] (Flamines and Vestales, in their later form) performed between them the whole religious duty of the community; to these we may perhaps add the warrior-priests of Mars (Salii). The connexion of the decoration with the Mars-cult is probable, if not certain; the laurel was sacred to Mars, for in front of his sacrarium in the regia there grew two laurels^[65], and it has been conjectured that they supplied the boughs used on this day^[66].

March 1 is also marked in the calendar of Philocalus as the birthday of Mars (N̄ = natalis Martis). This appears in no other calendar as yet discovered, and is conspicuously absent in the Fasti Praenestini; it is therefore very doubtful whether any weight should be given to a fourth-century writer whose calendar had certainly an urban and not a rustic basis^[67]. There is no trace of allusion to a birth of Mars on this day in Latin literature, though the day is often mentioned. There was indeed a pretty legend of such a birth, told by Ovid under 37May 2^[68], which has its parallels in other mythologies; Juno became pregnant of Mars by touching a certain flower of which the secret was told her by Flora:

Of this tale Preller remarked long ago that it has a Greek setting: it is in fact in its Ovidian form a reflex from stories such as those of the birth of Athena and of Kora. Yet it has been stoutly maintained^[69] that it sprang from a real Italian germ, and is a fragment of the lost Italian mythology. Now, though it is certainly untrue that the Italians had no native mythology, and though there are faint traces, as we shall see, of tales about Mars himself, yet the Latins at least so rarely took these liberties with their deities^[70], that every apparent case of a divine myth needs to be carefully examined and well supported. In this case we must conclude that there is hardly any evidence for a general belief that March 1 was the birthday of Mars; and that Ovid’s story of Juno and Mars must be looked on with suspicion so far as these deities are concerned.

The idea that Mars was born on March 1 might arise simply 38from the fact that the day was the first of his month and also the first of the year. It is possible however to account for it in another way. It was the dies natalis of the temple of Juno Lucina on the Esquiline, as we learn from the note in the Fasti Praenestini; and this Juno had a special power in childbirth. The temple itself was not of very ancient date^[71], but Juno had no doubt always been especially the matrons’ deity, and in a sense represented the female principle of life^[72]. To her all kalends were sacred, and more especially the first kalends of the year, on which we find that wives received presents from their husbands^[73], and entertained their slaves. In fact the day was sometimes called the Matronalia^[74], though the name has no technical or religious sense. Surely, if a mother was to be found for Mars, no one could be more suitable that Juno Lucina; and if a day were to be fixed for his birth, no day could be better than the first kalends of the year, which was also the dedication-day of the temple of the goddess. At what date the mother and the birthday were found for him it is impossible to discover. The latter may be as late as the Empire; the former may have been an older invention, since Mars seems to have been apt to lend himself, under Greek or Etruscan influence, somewhat more easily to legendary treatment than some other deities^[75] But we may at any rate feel pretty sure that it was the Matronalia on March 1 that suggested the motherhood of Juno and the birth of Mars; and we cannot, as Roscher does, use the Matronalia to show that these myths were old and native^[76].

Yet another legend was attached to this day. It was said that the original ancile, or sacred shield of Mars, fell down from heaven^[77], or was found in the house of Numa^[78], on March 1. This was the type from which were copied the other 39eleven belonging to the collegium of Salii Palatini; in the legend the smith who did this work was named Mamurius, and was commemorated in the Salian hymn^[79]. These are simply fragments of a tangle of myth which grew up out of the mystery attaching to the Salii, or dancing priests of Mars, and to the curious shields which they carried, and the hymns which they sang^[80]; in the latter we know that the word Mamuri often occurred, which is now generally recognized as being only a variant of the name Mars^[81]. We shall meet with the word again later in the month. This also was the first day on which the shields were ‘moved,’ as it was called; i. e. taken by the Salii from the sacrarium Martis in the Regia^[82], and carried through the city in procession. Dionysius (ii. 70) has left us a valuable description of these processions, which continued till the 24th of the month; the Salii leaped and danced, reminding the writer of the Greek Curetes, and continually struck the shields with a short spear or staff^[83] as they sang their ancient hymns and performed their rhythmical dances.

The original object and meaning of all these strange performances is now fairly well made out, thanks to the researches of Müllenhoff, Mannhardt, Roscher, Frazer and others. Roscher, in his comparison of Apollo and Mars^[84], pointed out the likeness in the spring festivals of the two gods. At Delphi, at the Theophania (7th of Bysios = March), there were decorations, sacrifices, dances, and songs; and of these last, some were 40ὔμνοι κλητικοί, or invocations to the god to appear, some παιᾶνες, or shouts of encouragement in his great fight with the dragon, or perhaps intended to scare the dragon away. For Apollo was believed to return in the spring, to be born anew, and to struggle in his infancy with the demon of evil. At other places in Greece similar performances are found; at Delos^[85], at Ortygia^[86] near Ephesus, at Tegyra, and elsewhere. At Ortygia the Κουρῆτες stood and clashed their arms to frighten away Hera the enemy of Apollo’s mother Leto, in the annual dramatic representation of the perilous labour of the mother and the birth of her son. These practices (and similar ones among northern peoples) seem to be the result of the poetical mythology of an imaginative race acting on still more primitive ideas. From all parts of the world Mr. Frazer has collected examples of rites of this kind occurring at some period of real or supposed peril, and often at the opening of a new year, in which dances, howling, the beating of pots and pans, brandishing of arms, and even firing of guns are thought efficacious in driving out evil spirits which bring hurt of some kind to mankind or to the crops which are the fruits of his labour^[87]. This notion of evil spirits and the possibility of expelling them is at the root of the whole series of practices, which in the hands of the Greeks became adorned with a beautiful mythical colouring, while the Romans after their fashion embodied them in the cult of their city with a special priesthood to perform them, and connected them with the name of their great priest king.

In an elaborate note^[88] Mr. Frazer has attempted to explain the rites of the Salii in the light of the material he has collected. He is inclined to see two objects in their performances: (1) the routing out of demons of all kinds in order to collect them for transference to the human scapegoat, Mamurius Veturius (see 41below on March 14), who was driven out a fortnight later; and (2) to make the corn grow, by a charm consisting in leaping and dancing, which is known in many parts of the world. It will perhaps be safer to keep to generalities in matters of which we have but slender knowledge; and to conclude that the old Latins believed that the Spirit which was beginning to make the crops grow must at this time be protected from hostile demons, in order that he might be free to perform his own friendly functions for the community. Though the few words preserved of the Salian hymns are too obscure to be of much use^[89], we seem to see in them a trace of a deity of vegetation; and the prayer to Mars, which is given in Cato’s agricultural treatise, is most instructive on this point^[90].

The Salii in these processions were clothed in a trabea and tunica picta^[91], the ‘full dress’ of the warrior inspired by some special religious zeal, wearing helmet, breastplate, and sword. They carried the ancile on the left arm, and a staff or club of some kind to strike it with^[92]. At certain sacred places they stopped and danced, their praesul giving them the step and rhythm; and here we may suppose that they also sang the song of which a few fragments have come down to us, where the recurring word Mamurius seems beyond doubt to be a variant of Mars^[93]. Each evening they rested at a different place—mansiones Saliorum, as they were called—and here the sacred arms were hung up till the next day, and the Salii feasted. They were twenty-four in number, twelve Palatini and twelve Collini (originally Agonales or Agonenses), the former specially devoted to the worship of Mars Gradivus, the latter to that of Quirinus^[94]. The antiquity of the priesthood 42is proved by the fact that the Salii must be of patrician birth, and patrimi and matrimi (i. e. with both parents living) according to the ancient rule which descended from the worship of the household^[95].

It has been suggested that the shields (ancilia) which the Salii carried, being twelve in number for each of the two guilds, represented the twelve months of the year, either as twelve suns^[96] (the sun being renewed each month), or as twelve moons, which is a little more reasonable. This idea implies that the number of the Salii (which was the same as that of the Fratres Arvales) was based on the number of months in the year, which is very far from likely; it would seem also to assume that the shape of the shields was round, like sun or moon, which was almost certainly not the case. According to the legend, the original shield fell on the first new moon of the year; but it is quite unnecessary to jump to the conclusion that the others represent eleven other new moons. It would rather seem probable to a cautious inquirer that though an incrustation of late myth may have grown upon the Salii and their carmen and their curious arms, no amount of ingenious combination has as yet succeeded in proving that such myths had their origin in any really ancient belief of the Romans. What we know for certain is that there were twelve warrior-priests of the old Palatine city, and that they carried twelve shields of an antique type, which Varro compares to the Thracian peltae (L. L. 7. 43); shaped not unlike the body of a violin, with a curved indentation on each side^[97], which, 43when the shield was slung on the back, would leave space for the arms to move freely. In this respect, as in the rest of his equipment, the Salius simply represented the old Italian warrior in his ‘war-paint.’ In the examples of expulsion of evils referred to above as collected by Mr. Frazer, it is interesting to notice how often the expellers use military arms, or are dressed in military fashion. This may perhaps help us to understand how attributes apparently so distinct as the military and the agricultural should be found united in Mars and his cult.

... [VEDI]OVI. ARTIS VEDIOVIS INTER DUOS LUCOS. (PRAEN.)

Various conjectures have been made for correcting this note. We may take it that the first word is rightly completed: some letters seem to have preceded it, and feriae has been suggested^[98], but not generally accepted. The next word, Artis, must be a slip of the stone-cutter. That it was not Martis we are sure, as Ovid says that there was no note in the Fasti for this day except on the cult of Vediovis^[99]. Even Mommsen is in despair, but suggests Aedis as a possibility, and that dedicata was accidentally omitted after it.

We do not know when the temple was dedicated^[100]. The cult of Vediovis seems to have no special connexion with other March rites: and it seems as well to postpone consideration of it till May 21, the dedication-day of the temple in arce. See also on Jan. 1.

ARMA ANCILIA MOVENT. (PHILOC.)

As we have seen, the first ‘moving’ of the ancilia was on the 1st. This is the second mentioned in the calendars; 44the third, according to Lydus (4. 42), was on the 23rd (Tubilustrium, q.v.). As the Salii seem to have danced with the shields all through the month up to the 24th^[101], it has been supposed that these were the three principal days of ‘moving’; and Mr. Marindin suggests that they correspond to the three most important mansiones Saliorum, of which two were probably the Curia Saliorum on the Palatine and the Sacrarium Martis in the Regia^[102].

EQUIRR[IA]. (MAFF. VAT. ESQ.)
FERIAE MARTI. (VAT.)
SACRUM MAMURIO. (RUSTIC CALENDARS^[103].)
MAMURALIA. (PHILOC.)

These notes involve several difficulties. To begin with, this day is an even number, and there is no other instance in the calendar of a festival occurring on such a day. Wissowa^[104], usually a very cautious inquirer, here boldly cuts the knot by conjecturing that the Mars festival of this day had originally been on the next, i.e. the Ides, but was put back one day to enable the people to frequent both the horse-races (Equirria) and the festival of Anna Perenna^[105]. The latter, he might have added, was obviously extremely popular with the lower classes, as we shall see from Ovid’s description; and though the scene of it was close to that of the Equirria, or certainly not far away, it is not impossible that it may have diverted attention from the nobler and more manly amusement. Wissowa strengthens 45his argument by pointing out an apparent parallel between the festival dates of March and October. Here, as elsewhere, in the calendar, we find an interval of three days between two festivals, viz. between March 19 (Quinquatrus) and March 23 (Tubilustrium), and between Oct. 15 (‘October horse’) and Oct. 19 (Armilustrium). Now, as we shall see, the rites of March 19 and Oct. 19 seem to correspond to each other^[106]; and if there were a chariot-race on March 15, it would also answer to the race on the day of the ‘October horse,’ Oct. 15, with a three days’ interval as in October. The argument is not a very strong one, but there is a good deal to be said for it.

A much more serious difficulty lies in the discrepancy between the three older calendars in which we have notes for this day and the almanacs of the later Empire, viz. that of Philocalus (A.D. 354) and the rustic calendars. The former tell us of a Mars-festival, with a horse-race; the latter know nothing of these, but note a festival of Mamurius, a name which, as we saw, occurred in the Saliare Carmen apparently as a variant of Mars, and came to be affixed to the legendary smith who made the eleven copies of the ancile. How are we to account for the change of Mars into Mamurius, and of feriae Marti into Mamuralia? And are we to suppose that the later calendars here indicate a late growth of legend, based on the name Mamurius as occurring in the Carmen Saliare, or that they have preserved the shadow of an earlier and popular side of the March rites, which the State-calendars left out of account?

Apparently Mommsen holds the former opinion^[107]. In his note on this day he says that it is easy to understand how the second Equirria came to be known to the vulgus as Mamuralia (i.e. so distinguished from the first Equirria on Feb. 27), seeing that Mamurius who made the ancilia belongs wholly to the cult of Mars, and that this day was one of those on which the Salii and the ancilia were familiar sights in the streets of Rome. In other words, the Salian songs gave rise to the legend of Mamurius, and this in its turn gave a new name to the second Equirria or feriae Marti. And this I believe to be the most rational 46explanation of our difficulty, seeing that we have no mention of a feast of Mamurius earlier than the calendar of Philocalus in the fourth century A.D., which cannot be regarded as in any sense representing learning or research^[108].

But of recent years much has been written in favour of the other view, that the late calendars have here preserved for us a trace of very ancient Roman belief and ritual^[109]. This view rests almost entirely on a statement of a still later writer, Laurentius Lydus of Apamea, who wrote a work, de Mensibus, in the first half of the sixth century A.D., preserved in part in the form of two summaries or collections of extracts. Lydus was no doubt a man of learning, as is shown by his other work, de Magistratibus; but he does not give us his authority for particular statements, and his second- or third-hand knowledge must always be cautiously used.

Lydus tells us that on the Ides of March (a mistake, it is supposed^[110], for the 14th—which, however, he should not have made), a man clothed in skins was led out and driven with long peeled wands (out of the city, as we may guess from what follows) and shouted at as ‘Mamurius.’ Hence the saying, when any one is beaten, that they are ‘playing Mamurius with him.’ For the legend runs that Mamurius the smith was beaten out of the city because misfortune fell on the Romans when they substituted the new shields (made by Mamurius) for those that had fallen from heaven^[111].

This is clearly a late form of the Mamurius-myth: in all the earlier accounts^[112] only one ancile is said to have fallen from heaven. Lydus seems rather to be thinking of twelve original ones^[113], and twelve copies—perhaps of the Palatine and Colline ancilia respectively. If the form of the myth, then, is of late 47growth, suspicion may well be aroused as to the antiquity of the rite it was meant to explain, for with the older type of myth the rite does not seem to suit. And this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that in the whole of Latin literature there is no certain allusion to a rite so striking and peculiar, and only one that can possibly, even by forcible treatment, be taken as such. In Propertius v (iv.) 2. 61, we have the following lines, put into the mouth of the god Vertumnus:

Usener took this to mean, or to imply, that Mamurius was driven out of the city to its enemies the Oscans; but how we are to get this out of the words, which will bear very different interpretations, obscure as they are, it is not easy to see. And can we easily believe that, with this exception, no allusion should be found to the rite in either Latin or Greek writers—not in Ovid, Dionysius, Servius, Plutarch^[114], or in the fragments of Varro, Varrius, and others—if that curious rite had really been enacted year by year before the eyes of the Roman people? It certainly is not impossible that it may have slipped their notice, or have been mentioned in works that are lost to us; but it is so improbable as to justify us in hesitating to base conclusions as to the antiquity of the rite on the statement of Lydus alone.

There are indeed one or two passages which seem to prove that skins were used by the Salii, and that these skins were beaten. Servius^[115] says of Mamurius that they consecrated a day to him, on which ‘pellem virgis caedunt ad artis similitudinem,’ i. e. on which they imitate the smith’s art by beating a skin. So also Minucius Felix^[116]: ‘alii (we should probably read Salii) incedunt pileati, scuta vetera^[117] circumferunt, pelles caedunt.’ If we may judge by these passages of writers of the second century, there was something done by the Salii which involved the beating of skins; but if it was a skin-clad Mamurius who 48was beaten, why is he not mentioned, and why did they, as Servius says (and the context shows that he is speaking of him with all respect), set apart a day in his honour?

Yet Lydus’ account is so interesting from the point of view of folk-lore, that Usener was led by it into very far-reaching conclusions. These have been so well condensed in English by Mr. Frazer that my labour will be lightened if I may borrow his account^[118]:

‘Every year on March 14 a man clad in skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome, beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. He was called Mamurius Veturius^[119], that is, “the old Mars,” and as the ceremony took place on the day preceding the first full moon of the old Roman year^[120] (which began on March 1), the skin-clad man must have represented the Mars of the past year, who was driven out at the beginning of a new one. Now Mars was originally not a god of war, but of vegetation. For it was to Mars that the Roman husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and vines, his fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to sacrifice for the growth of the crops, addressed their petitions almost exclusively.... Once more, the fact that the vernal month of March was dedicated to Mars seems to point him out as the deity of the sprouting vegetation. Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old Mars at the beginning of the New Year in spring is identical with the Slavonic custom of “carrying out Death^[121],” if the view here taken of the latter custom is correct. 49The similarity of the Roman and Slavonic customs has been already remarked by scholars, who appear, however, to have taken Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding figures in the Slavonic ceremonies to be representatives of the old year rather than of the old god of vegetation. It is possible that ceremonies of this kind may have come to be thus interpreted in later times even by the people who practised them. But the personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic ceremony, the representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a deity of vegetation, but also as a scape-goat^[122]. His expulsion implies this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such, should be expelled the city. But it is otherwise if he is also a scape-goat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other lands. And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius appears to have been driven away to the lands of the Oscans, the enemies of Rome^[123].’

My examination of the evidence will, I hope, have made it clear why I hesitate to endorse these conclusions in their entirety (as I did for many years), interesting as they are. I rather incline to believe that the whole Mamurius-legend grew out of the Carmen Saliare, and that we may either have here one of those comparatively rare examples of later ritual growing itself out of myth, or a point of ancient ritual, such as the use of skins—perhaps those of victims—misinterpreted and possibly altered under the influence of the 50myth. As to Lydus’ statement, it is better to suspend our judgement; he may, for all we know, have confused some foreign custom, or that of some other Italian town where there were Salii, with the ritual of a Roman priesthood^[124]. In any case, his account is too much open to question to bear the weight of conjecture that has been piled upon it.

FERIAE^[125] ANNAE PERENNAE VIA FLAM[INIA] AD LAPIDEM PRIM[UM]. (VAT.)

ANNAE PER. (FARN.)

This is a survival of an old popular festival, as is clearly seen from Ovid’s account of it; but the absence of any mention of it in the rustic calendars or in those of Philocalus and Silvius leads us to suppose that it had died out in the early Empire. This may be accounted for by the fact that the people came to be more and more attracted by spectacles and games; and also by the ever-increasing cosmopolitanism of the city populace, which would be continually losing interest in old Roman customs which it could not understand.

On this day, Ovid tells us^[126], the ‘plebs’ streamed out to the ‘festum geniale’ of Anna Perenna, and taking up a position in the Campus Martius, not far from the Tiber^[127], and lying 51about on the grass in pairs of men and women, passed the day in revelry and drinking^[128]. Some lay in the open; some pitched tents and some constructed rude huts of stakes and branches, stretching their togas over them for shelter. As they drank they prayed for as many years of life as they can swallow cups of wine; meanwhile singing snatches of song with much gesticulation and dancing. The result of these performances was naturally that they returned to the city in a state of intoxication. Ovid tells us that he had seen this spectacle himself^[129].

Whether there was any sacrificial rite in immediate connexion with these revels we do not know. Macrobius indeed tells us^[130] that sacrifice was offered in the month of March to Anna Perenna ‘ut annare perannareque commode liceat’^[131]; and Lydus, that on the Ides there were εὐχαὶ δημόσιαι ὑπὲρ τοῦ ὑγιεινὸν γενέσθαι τὸν ἐνιαυτόν; but we do not know what was the relation between these and the scene described by Ovid.

Who was the Anna Perenna in whose honour these revels, sacrifices, and prayers took place, whatever their relation to each other? Ovid and Silius Italicus^[132] tell legends about her which are hardly genuine Italian, and in which Anna Perenna is confused with the other Anna whom they knew, the sister of Dido. Hidden under such stories may sometimes be found traces of a belief or a cult of which we have no other knowledge; but in this poetical medley there seems to be only one feature that calls on us to pause. After her wanderings Anna disappears in the waters of the river Numicius:

52Her companions traced her footsteps to the bank: she seemed to tell them

This tale led Klausen^[133] into some very strange fancies about the goddess, whom he regarded as a water-nymph, thinking that all her other characteristics (e.g. the year) might be explained symbolically; the running water representing the flow of time, &c. But it is probable that she only came into connexion with the river Numicius because Aeneas was there already. If Aeneas, as Jupiter Indiges, was buried on its banks^[134], what could be more natural than that another figure of the Dido legend should be brought there too? There does not indeed seem to be any reason for connecting the real Anna Perenna with water^[135]. All genuine Roman tradition seems to represent her, as we shall see directly, as an old woman; and when she appears in another shape, she must have become mixed up with other ideas and stories. It may perhaps be just possible that on this day some kind of an image of her may have been thrown into the Tiber, as was the case with the straw puppets (Argei) on May 15, and that the ceremony dropped out of practice, but just survived in the Numicius legend^[136]. But this is simply hypothesis.

The fact is that, whatever else Anna Perenna may have been, all that we can confidently say of her is that she represented in some way the circle or ring of the year. This is indicated not only by the name, which can hardly be anything but a feminine form of annus, but by the time at which her 53festival took place, the first full moon of the new year. The one legend preserved about her which is of undoubted Italian origin is thought to point in the same direction. Ovid, wishing to explain ‘cur cantent obscena puellae’ in that revel of the ‘plebs’ on the Tiber-bank, tells us^[137] how Mars, once in love with Minerva^[138], came to Anna and asked her aid. It was at length granted, and Mars had the nuptial couch prepared: thither a bride was led, but not the desired one; it was old Anna with her face veiled like a bride who was playing the passionate god such a trick as we may suppose not uncommon in the rude country life of old Latium.

There is no need to be startled at the rude handling of the gods in this story, which seems so unlike the stately and orderly ideas of Roman theology. It must be borne in mind that folk-tales like this need not originally have been applied to the gods at all. They are probably only ancient country stories of human beings, based on some rude marriage custom—stories such as delighted the lower farm folk and slaves on holiday evenings; and they have survived simply because they became in course of time attached to the persons of the gods, as the conception of divinities grew to be more anthropomorphic. Granted that Anna or Perenna^[139] was the old woman of the past year, that Mars was the god of the first month, and that the story as applied to human beings was a favourite one, we can easily understand how it came to attach itself to the persons of the gods^[140].

Yet another story is told by Ovid of an Anna^[141], in writing of whom he does not add the name Perenna. The Plebs had seceded to the Mons Sacer, and were beginning to suffer from starvation, when an old woman from Bovillae, named Anna, came to the rescue with a daily supply of rustica liba. This myth seems to me to have grown out of the custom, to be described directly, of old women^[142] selling liba on the 17th 54(Liberalia), the custom having been transferred to that day through an etymological confusion between liba and Liberalia. Usener, however, saw here a connexion between Anna and Annona^[143]; and recently it has been suggested that a certain Egyptian Anna, who is said by Plutarch to have invented a mould for bread-baking, may have found her way to Rome through Greek channels^[144].

LIB[ERALIA]. (MAFF. FARN. RUST.)
LIB. AG[ONIA]. LIBERO LIB. (CAER.)
AG[ONIA]. (VAT.)
LIBERO IN CA[PITOLIO]. (FARN.)

This is one of the four days marked AG. or AGON. in the Fasti (Jan. 9, May 21, Dec. 11)^[145]. It is curious that on this day two of the old calendars should mark the Liberalia only, and one the Agonia only, and one both. The day was generally known as Liberalia^[146]; the other name seems to have been known to the priests only, and more especially to the Salii Collini or Agonenses^[147], who must have had charge of the sacrifice. Wissowa seems to be right in thinking (de Feriis xii) that the conjunction of Liberalia and Agonia is purely accidental, and that the day took its common name from the former simply because, as the latter occurred four times in the year, confusion would be likely to arise.

Liber is beyond doubt an old Italian deity, whose true nature, like that of so many others, came to be overgrown with Greek ideas and rites. There is no sign of any connexion between this festival and the cult of Dionysus; hence we 55infer that there was an old Latin Liber before the arrival of the Greek god in Italy. What this god was, however, can hardly be inferred from his cult, of which we only know a single feature, recorded by Ovid^[148]. He tells us that old women, sacerdotes Liberi, sat crowned with ivy all about the streets on this day with cakes of oil and honey (liba), and a small portable altar (foculus), on which to sacrifice for the benefit of the buyer of these cakes. This tells us nothing substantial, and we have to fall back on the name—always an uncertain method. The best authorities seem now agreed in regarding the word Liber (whatever be its etymology) as having something of the same meaning as genius, forming an adjective liberalis as genius forms genialis, and meaning a creative, productive spirit, full of blessing, and so generous, free, &c.^[149] If this were so it would not be unnatural that the characteristics and rites of Dionysus should find here a stem on which to engraft themselves, or that Liber should become the object of obscene ceremonies which need not be detailed here, and also the god of the Italian vine-growers.

It is possible that Liber may have been an ancient cult-title of Jupiter; we do in fact find a Jupiter Liber in inscriptions, though the combination is uncommon^[150]. In that case Liber may have been an emanation or off-shoot from Jupiter, as Silvanus probably was from Mars^[151]. But I am disposed to think that the characteristics of Liber, so far as we know them, are not in keeping with those of Jupiter; and that the process was rather of the opposite kind, that is, the cult of Liber in its later form became attached to that of Jupiter, who was always the presiding deity of vineyards and wine-making^[152].

56This was also the usual day on which boys assumed the toga virilis (toga recta, pura, libera):

We know indeed that in the late Republic and Empire other days were used for this ceremony: Virgil took his toga on Oct. 15, Octavian on Oct. 18, Tiberius on April 24, Nero on July 7^[154]; but it is likely that this day was in earlier times the regular one, in spite of the inconvenience of a disparity of age thence resulting amongst the tirones. For whether or no the toga libera has any real connexion with the Liberalia, this was the time when the army was called out for the year, and when the tirones would be required to present themselves^[155]. Ovid tells us that on this day the rustic population flocked into the city for the Liberalia, and the opportunity was doubtless taken to make known the list of tirones, as the boys were called when the toga was assumed and they were ready for military service.

They sacrificed, it appears, before leaving home and again on the Capitol, either to Pubertas or Liber, or both^[156].

On this day also, according to Ovid, and also on the previous one, some kind of a procession ‘went to the Argei’^[157]; by which word is meant, we may be almost sure, the Argeorum sacella. There were in various parts of the four regions of the Servian city a number of sacella or sacraria, which were called Argei, Argea, or Argeorum sacella. What these were we never 57shall know for certain; but we may be fairly sure that their number was twenty-four, six for each region; the same number as that of the rush puppets or simulacra also called Argei, which were thrown into the Tiber by the Vestal Virgins on May 15. The identity of the name and number leads to the belief that there was a connexion between these sacella and the simulacra; but the very difficult questions which arose about both must be postponed till we have before us the whole of the ceremonial, i. e. that of May 15 as well as that of March 17. About this last we know nothing and can at best attempt to infer its character from the ceremony in May, of which we fortunately have some particulars on which we can fully rely.

QUINQ[VATRUS]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN. VAT. FARN.)
QUINQUATRIA. (RUST. PHIL. SILV.)

A note is appended in Praen., which is thus completed by Mommsen with the help of a Verrian gloss (Fest. 254).

[RECTIUS TAMEN ALII PUTARUNT DICTUM AB EO QUOD HIC DIES EST POST DIEM V IDUS. QUO]D IN LATIO POST [IDUS DIES SIMILI FERE RATIONE DECLI]NARENTUR.

FERIAE MARTI (VAT.)

[SALI] FACIUNT IN COMITIO SALTUS [ADSTANTIBUS PO]NTIFICIBUS ET TRIB[UNIS] CELER[UM]. Praen., in which we find yet another note: ARTIFICUM DIES [QUOD MINERVAE] AEDIS IN AVENTINO EO DIE EST [DEDICATA].

The original significance of this day is indicated by the note Feriae Marti in Vat., and also by that in Praen., which has been amplified with tolerable certainty. The Salii were active this day in the worship of Mars, and the scene of their activity was the Comitium. With this agrees, as Mommsen has pointed out, the statement of Varro^[158] that the Comitium was the scene 58of some of their performances, though he does not mention which. More light is thrown on the matter by the grammarian Charisius^[159], who, in suggesting an explanation of the name Quinquatrus by which this day was generally known, remarks that it was derived from a verb quinquare, to purify, ‘quod eo die arma ancilia lustrari sint solita.’ His etymology is undoubtedly wrong, but the reason given for it is valuable^[160]. The ancilia were purified on this day (perhaps by the Salii dancing around them), and thus it exactly answers to the Armilustrium on Oct. 19, just as the horse-races on the Ides of March, if that indeed were the original day, correspond to the ceremony of the ‘October horse’^[161].

The object and meaning of the lustratio in each case is not, however, quite clear. Since in March the season of war began, and ended, no doubt, originally in October^[162], and as the Salii seem to be a kind of link between the religious and military sides of the state’s life, we are tempted to guess that the lustration of the ancilia represented in some way the lustration of the arms of the entire host, or perhaps that the latter were all lustrated so as to be ready for use, on this day, and once again on Oct. 19 before they were put away for the winter. In this latter case the Salii would be the leaders of, as well as sharers in, a general purifying process. And that this is the right view seems to be indicated by Verrius’ note in the Praenestine calendar, from which it is clear that the tribuni celerum were present, and took some part in the ceremony. These tribuni were almost certainly the three leaders of the original cavalry force of the three ancient tribes, and they seem to have united both priestly and military characteristics^[163]; and from their presence in the Comitium may perhaps also be inferred that of the leaders of the infantry tribuni militum. In the earliest times, therefore, the arms of the whole host may have been lustrated in the presence of its leaders, the Salii, so to 59speak, performing the service; but in later times the Salii alone were left, and their arms alone lustrated, though possibly individuals representing the ancient tribuni celerum may have appeared as congregation.

But this day was generally known as Quinquatrus, simply because it was the fifth day after the Ides^[164]; i.e. there was a space of three days between the Ides and the festival. Such intervals of three days, either between the Ides and the festival or between one festival and another, occur several times in the Roman calendar^[165], though in this instance alone the day following the interval appears in the calendars as Quinquatrus. The term was no doubt a pontifical one, and the meaning was unknown to the common people; in any case it came to be misunderstood, and was in later times popularly applied to the four days following the festival as well as the festival itself; its first syllable being taken to indicate a five-day period instead of the fifth day after the Ides. This popular mistake led to still further confusion owing to a curious change in the religious character of these days, about the nature of which there can be no serious doubt.

The 19th came to be considered as sacred to Minerva^[166], because a temple to that goddess was consecrated on this day, on the Caelian or the Aventine, or possibly both^[167]. There is no obvious connexion between Mars and Minerva; and it is now thought probable that Minerva has here simply taken 60the place of another goddess, Nerio—one almost lost to sight in historical times, but of whose early connexion with Mars some faint traces are to be found. Thus where we find Minerva brought into close relation with Mars, as in the myth of Anna Perenna, it is thought that we should read Nerio instead of Minerva^[168]. This conclusion is strengthened by a note of Porphyrion on Horace Epist. ii. 2. 209 ‘Maio mense religio est nubere, et etiam Martio, in quo de nuptiis habito certamine a Minerva Mars victus est: obtenta virginitate Neriene est appellata.’ As Neriene must = Nerio^[169], this looks much like an attempt to explain the occurrence of two female names, Minerva and Nerio, in the same story; the original heroine, Nerio, having been supplanted by the later Minerva^[170].

Of this Nerio much, perhaps too much, has been made in recent years by ingenious scholars. A complete love-story has been discovered, in which Mars, at first defeated in his wooing, as Porphyrion tells us in the passage just quoted, eventually becomes victorious; for Nerio is called wife of Mars in a fragment of an old comedy by Licinius Imbrex, in a passage of Plautus, and in a prayer put into the mouth of Hersilia by Gellius the annalist, when she asked for peace at the hand of T. Tatius^[171]. And this story has been fitted on, without sufficient warrant, to the Mars-festivals of this month. Mars is supposed to have been born on the Kalends, to have grown wondrously between Kalends and Ides, to have fallen then in love with Nerio, to have been fooled as we saw by Anna Perenna, to have been rejected and defeated by his sweetheart, and finally to have won her as his wife on the 19th^[172]. Are we to find here a fragment of real Italian mythology, or an elaborate example of the Graecizing anthropomorphic tendencies of the third and second centuries B.C.?

The question is a difficult one, and lies rather outside the scope of this work. Those who have read Usener’s brilliant 61paper will find it hard to shake themselves free of the conviction that he has unearthed a real myth, unless they carefully study the chapter of Aulus Gellius which is its chief foundation. Such a study has brought me back to the conviction that Plautus and the others were writing in terms of the fashionable modes of thought of their day, and were not appealing to popular ideas of the relations of Italian deities to each other^[173]. Aulus Gellius begins by quoting a comprecatio from the book of the Libri sacerdotum populi Romani. ‘In his scriptum est: Luam Saturni, Salaciam Neptuni, Horam Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maiam Volcani, Heriem Iunonis, Moles Martis Nerienemque Martis.’ A glance at the names thus coupled together is enough to show that Mars is not here thought of as the husband of Neriene; the names Lua, Salacia, &c., seem rather to express some characteristic of the deity with whose name they are joined or some mode of his operation^[174]; and Gellius himself, working on an etymology of Nerio which has generally been accepted as correct, explains the name thus: ‘Nerio igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis demonstratur.’ In the latter part of his chapter, after quoting Plautus, he says that he has heard the poet blamed by an eminent critic for the strange and false notion that Nerio was the wife of Mars; but he is inclined to think that there was a real tradition to that effect, and cites his namesake the annalist and Licinius Imbrex in support of his view.

But neither annalist nor play-writer can stand against that passage from the sacred books with which he began his chapter; and if we give the latter its due weight, the value of the others is relatively diminished. It appears to me that 62the one represents the true primitive Italian idea of divine powers, which with its abundance of names offered excellent opportunities to anthropomorphic tendencies of the Graecizing school, while the others show those tendencies actually producing their results. Any conclusion on the point must be of the nature of a guess; but I am strongly disposed to think (1) that Nerio was not originally an independent deity, but a name attached to Mars expressive of some aspect of his power, (2) that the name gradually became endowed with personality, and (3) that out of the combination of Mars and Nerio the Graecizing school developed a myth of which the fragments have been taken by Usener and his followers as pure Roman.

Having once been displaced by Minerva, Nerio vanished from the calendar, and with her that special aspect of Mars—whatever it may have been—which the name was intended to express. The five days, 18th to 23rd, became permanently associated with Minerva. The 19th was the dedication-day of at least one of her temples, and counted as her birthday^[175]: the 23rd was the Tubilustrium, with a sacrifice to ‘dea fortis,’ who seems to have been taken for Minerva, owing to an incorrect idea that the latter was specially the deity of trumpet-players^[176]. She was no doubt an old Italian deity of artificers and trade-guilds; but the Tubilustrium was really a Mars-festival, and Minerva had no immediate connexion with it.

TUBILUST[RIUM]. (CAER. MAFF. VAT. FARN. MIN. III.)
TUBILUSTRIUM. (PHILOC.)

Note in Praen.: [FERIAE] MARTI^[177]. HIC DIES APPELLATUR ITA, QUOD IN ATRIO SUTORIO TUBI LUSTRANTUR, QUIBUS IN SACRIS UTUNTUR. LUTATIUS QUIDEM CLAVAM EAM AIT ESSE IN RUINIS PALA[TI I]NCENSI A GALLIS REPERTAM, QUA ROMULUS URBEM INAUGURAVERIT.

Q. R. C. F. (VAT. CAER.)

Q. REX. C. F. (MAFF. PRAEN.)

Note in Praen.: HUNC DIEM PLERIQUE PERPERAM INTERPRETANTES PUTANT APPELLAR[I] QUOD EO DIE EX COMITIO FUGERIT [REX: N]AM NEQUE TARQUINIUS ABIIT EX COMITIO [URBIS], ET ALIO QUOQUE MENSE EADEM SUNT [IDEMQUE S]IGNIFICANT. QU[ARE COMITIIS PERACTIS IUDICI]A FIERI INDICA[RI IIS MAGIS PUTAMUS]^[178].

These two days must be taken in connexion with the 23rd and 24th of May, which are marked in the calendars in exactly the same way. The explanation suggested by Mommsen is simple and satisfactory^[179]; the 24th of March and of May were the two fixed days on which the comitia curiata met for the sanctioning of wills^[180] under the presidency of the Rex. The 23rd in each month, called Tubilustrium, would be the day of the lustration of the tubae or tubi used in summoning the assembly. The letters Q. R. C. F. (quando rex comitiavit fas) mean that on the days so marked proceedings in the courts might only begin when the king had dissolved the Comitia.

The tuba, as distinguished from the tibia, which was the typical Italian instrument, was a long straight tube of brass with a bell mouth^[181]. It was used chiefly in military^[182] and 64religious ceremonies; and as the comitia curiata was an assembly both for military and religious objects, this would suit well with Mommsen’s idea of the object of the lustration. The Tubilustrium was the day on which these instruments, which were to be used at the meeting of the comitia on the following day, were purified by the sacrifice of a lamb. Of the Atrium Sutorium, where the rite took place, we know nothing.

There are some words at the end of Verrius’ note in the Praenestine Calendar, which, as Mommsen has pointed out^[183], come in abruptly and look as if something had dropped out: ‘Lutatius quidem clavam eam ait esse in ruinis Pala[ti i]ncensi a Gallis repertam, qua Romulus urbem inauguraverit.’ This clava must be the lituus of Romulus, mentioned by Cicero^[184], which was found on the Palatine and kept in the Curia Saliorum. We cannot, however, see clearly what Verrius or his excerptor meant to tell us about it; there would seem to have been a confusion between lituus in the sense of baculum and lituus in the sense of a tuba incurva. The latter was in use as well as the ordinary straight tuba^[185]; in shape it closely resembled the clava of the augur, and perhaps the resemblance led to the notion that it was the clava of Romulus and not a tuba which was this day purified with the other tubae.

We can learn little or nothing from the calendar of this month about the origin of Mars, and we have no other sufficient evidence on which to base a satisfactory conjecture. But from the cults of the month, and partly also from those of October, we can see pretty clearly what ideas were prominent in his worship even in the early days of the Roman state. They were chiefly two, and the two were closely connected. He was the Power who must be specially invoked to procure the safety of crops and cattle; and secondly, in his keeping were the safety and success of the freshly-enrolled host with its armour and its trumpets. In short, he was that deity to whom the most ancient Romans looked for aid at the season when all living things, man included, broke into fresh activity. He represents 65the characteristics of the early Roman more exactly than any other god; for there are two things which we may believe with certainty about the Roman people in the earliest times—(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race; and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours.

There can hardly be a doubt that this month takes its name, not from a deity, but from the verb aperio; the etymology is as old as Varro and Verrius, and seems perfectly natural^[186]. The year was opening and the young corn and the young cattle were growing. It was therefore a critical time for crops and herds; but there was not much to be done by man to secure their safety. The crops might be hoed and cleaned^[187], but must for the most part be left to the protection of the gods. The oldest festivals of the month, the Robigalia and Fordicidia, clearly had this object. So also with the cattle; oves lustrantur, say the rustic calendars^[188]; and such a lustratio of the cattle of the ancient Romans survived in the ceremonies of the Parilia.

Thus, if we keep clear of fanciful notions, such as those of Huschke^[189], about these early months of the year, which he seems to imagine was thought of as growing like an organic creature, we need find no great difficulty in April. We need not conclude too hastily that this was a month of purification preliminary to May, as February was to March. Like February, indeed, it has a large number of dies nefasti^[190], and its festivals 67are of a cathartic character, while March and May have some points in common; but beyond this we cannot safely venture. The later Romans would hardly have connected April with Venus^[191], had it been a sinister month; it was not in April, but in March and May, that weddings were ill-omened.

We may note the prevalence in this month of female deities, or of those which fluctuate between male and female—a sure sign of antiquity. These are deities of the earth, or vegetation, or generation, such as Tellus, Pales, Ceres, Flora, and perhaps also Fortuna. Hence the month became easily associated in later times with Venus, who was originally, perhaps, a garden deity^[192], but was overlaid in course of time with ideas brought from Sicily and Greece, and possibly even from Cyprus and the East. Lastly, we may note that the Magna Mater Idaea found a suitable position for her worship in this month towards the end of the third century B.C.

VENERALIA: LUDI. (PHILOC.)

Note in Praen.: ‘FREQUENTER MULIERES SUPPLICANT FORTUNAE VIRILI, HUMILIORES ETIAM IN BALINEIS, QUOD IN IIS EA PARTE CORPOR[IS] UTIQUE VIRI NUDANTUR, QUA FEMINARUM GRATIA DESIDERATUR.’

Lydus^[193] seems to have been acquainted with this note of Verrius in the Fasti of Praeneste; if so, we may guess that some words have been omitted by the man who cut the inscription, and 68we should insert with Mommsen^[194], after ‘supplicant,’ the words ‘honestiores Veneri Verticordiae.’ If we compare the passage of Lydus with the name Veneralia given to this day in the calendar of Philocalus, we may guess that the cult of Venus on April 1 came into fashion in late times among ladies of rank, while an old and gross custom was kept up by the humiliores in honour of Fortuna Virilis^[195]. This seems to be the most obvious explanation of the concurrence of the two goddesses on the same day; they were probably identified or amalgamated under the Empire, for example by Lydus, who does not mention Fortuna by name, and seems to confuse her worship on this day with that of Venus. But the two are still distinct in Ovid, though he seems to show some tendency to amalgamation^[196].

Fortuna Virilis, thus worshipped by the women when bathing, would seem from Ovid to have been that Fortuna who gave women good luck in their relations with men^[197]. The custom of bathing in the men’s baths may probably be taken as some kind of lustration, more especially as the women were adorned with myrtle, which had purifying virtues^[198]. How old this curious custom was we cannot guess. Plutarch^[199] mentions a temple of this Fortuna dedicated by Servius Tullius; but there was a strong tendency, as we shall see later on, to attribute all Fortuna-cults to this king.

The Venus who eventually supplanted Fortuna is clearly Venus Verticordia^[200], whose earliest temple was founded in 114 B.C., in obedience to an injunction of the Sibylline books, after the discovery of incest on the part of three vestal virgins, ‘quo facilius virginum mulierumque mens a libidine ad pudicitiam 69converteretur^[201].’ Macrobius insists that Venus had originally no share in the worship of this day or month^[202]; she must therefore have been introduced into it as a foreigner. Robertson Smith^[203] has shown some ground for the conjecture that she was the Cyprian Aphrodite (herself identical with the Semitic Astarte), who came to Rome by way of Sicily and Latium. For if Lydus can be trusted, the Roman ceremony of April 1 was found also in Cyprus, on the same day, with variations in detail. If that be so, the addition of the name Verticordia is a curious example of the accretion of a Roman cult-title expressive of domestic morality on a foreign deity of questionable reputation^[204].

MATR[I] MAG[NAE]. (MAFF.)
LUDI MEGALESIACI. (PHILOC.)

Note in Praen.: LUDI M[ATRI] D[EUM] M[AGNAE] I[DAEAE]. MEGALESIA VOCANTUR QUOD EA DEA MEGALE APPELLATUR. NOBILIUM MUTITATIONES CENARUM SOLITAE SUNT FREQUENTER FIERI, QUOD MATER MAGNA EX LIBRIS SIBULLINIS ARCESSITA LOCUM MUTAVIT EX PHRYGIA ROMAM.

The introduction of the Magna Mater Idaea into Rome can only be briefly mentioned here, as being more important for the history of religion at Rome than for that of the Roman religion. In B.C. 204, in accordance with a Sibylline oracle which had previously prophesied that the presence of this deity alone could drive the enemy out of Italy, the sacred stone representing the goddess arrived at Rome from Pessinus in Phrygia^[205]. Attalus, King of Pergamus, had acquired this territory, and now, as a faithful friend to Rome, consented to the transportation of the stone, which was received at Rome with enthusiasm by an excited and now hopeful people^[206]. 70Scipio was about to leave with his army for Africa; a fine harvest followed; Hannibal was forced to evacuate Italy the next year; and the goddess did everything that was expected of her^[207].

The stone was deposited in the temple of Victory on the Palatine on April 4^[208]. The day was made a festival; though no Roman festival occurs between the Kalends and Nones of any month, the rule apparently did not hold good in the case of a foreign worship^[209]. Great care was taken to keep up the foreign character of the cult. The name of the festival was a Greek one (Megalesia), as Cicero remarked^[210]; all Romans were forbidden by a senatus consultum to take any part in the service of the goddess^[211]. The temple dedicated thirteen years later on April 10^[212] seems to have been frequented by the nobilitas only, and the custom of giving dinner-parties on April 4, which is well attested, was confined to the upper classes^[213], while the plebs waited for its festivities till the ensuing Cerealia. The later and more extravagant developments of the cult did not come in until the Empire^[214].

The story told by Livy of the introduction of the goddess is an interesting episode in Roman history. It illustrates the far-reaching policy of the Senate in enlisting Eastern kings, religions, and oracles in the service of the state at a critical time, and also the curious readiness of the Roman people to believe in the efficacy of cults utterly foreign to their own religious practices. At the same time it shows how careful the government was then, as always, to keep such cults under strict supervision. But the long stress of the Hannibalic War had its natural effect on the Italian peoples; and less than 71twenty years later the introduction of the Bacchic orgies forced the senate to strain every nerve to counteract a serious danger to the national religion and morality.

FORD[ICIDIA]^[215]. (CAER. MAFF. VAT. PRAEN.)

This is beyond doubt one of the oldest sacrificial rites in the Roman religion. It consisted in the slaughter of pregnant cows (hordae or fordae), one in the Capitol and one in each of the thirty curiae^[216]; i. e. one for the state and the rest for each of its ancient divisions. This was the first festival of the curiae; the other, the Fornacalia, will be treated of under February 17. The cows were offered, as all authorities agree, to Tellus^[217], who, as we shall see, may be an indigitation of the same earth power represented by Ceres, Bona Dea, Dea Dia, and other female deities. The unborn calves were torn by attendants of the virgo vestalis maxima from the womb of the mother and burnt^[218], and their ashes were kept by the Vestals for use at the Parilia a few days later^[219]. This was the first ceremony in the year in which the Vestals took an active part, and it was the first of a series of acts all of which are connected with the fruits of the earth, their growth, ripening and harvesting. The object of burning the unborn calves seems to have been to procure the fertility of the corn now growing in the womb of mother earth, to whom the sacrifice was offered^[220].

72Many charms of this sacrificial kind have been noticed by various writers; one may be mentioned here which was described by Sir John Barrow, when British Ambassador in China in 1804. In a spring festival in the temple of Earth, a huge porcelain image of a cow was carried about and then broken in pieces, and a number of small cows taken from inside it and distributed among the people as earnests of a good season^[221]. This must be regarded as a survival of a rite which was no doubt originally one of the same kind as the Roman.

On this day^[222] the oracle of the great temple of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste was open to suppliants, as we learn from a fragment of the Praenestine Fasti. Though not a Roman festival, the day deserves to be noticed here, as this oracle was by far the most renowned in Italy. The cult of Fortuna will be discussed under June 25 and Sept. 13. It does not seem to be known whether the oracle was open on these days only; see R. Peter in Myth. Lex. s. v. Fortuna, 1545.

CER[IALIA]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN. ESQ.)

CERERI LIBERO (LIBERAE) ESQ.

Note: All the days from 12th to 19th are marked ludi, ludi Cer., or ludi Ceriales, in Tusc. Maff. Praen. Vat., taken together: loid. Cereri in Esq., where the 18th only is preserved: loedi C in Caer. Philocalus has Cerealici c. m. (circenses missus) xxiv on 12th and 19th.

The origin of the ludi Cereales, properly so called, cannot be proved to be earlier than the Second Punic War. The games 73first appear as fully established in B.C. 202^[223]. But from the fact that April 19 is marked CER in large letters in the calendars we may infer, with Mommsen^[224], that there was a festival in honour of Ceres as far back as the period of the monarchy. The question therefore arises whether this ancient Ceres was a native Italian deity, or the Greek Demeter afterwards known to the Romans as Ceres.

That there was such an Italian deity is placed almost beyond doubt by the name itself, which all authorities agree in connecting with cerus = genius, and with the cerfus and cerfia of the great inscription of Iguvium^[225]. The verbal form seems clearly to be creare^[226]; and thus, strange to say, we actually get some definite aid from etymology, and can safely see in the earliest Ceres, if we recollect her identification with the Greek goddess of the earth and its fruits, a deity presiding over or representing the generative powers of nature. We cannot, however, feel sure whether this deity was originally feminine only, or masculine also, as Arnobius seems to suggest^[227]. Judging from the occurrence of forms such as those quoted above, it is quite likely, as in the case of Pales, Liber, and others, that this numen was of both sexes, or of undetermined sex. So anxious were the primitive Italians to catch the ear of their deities by making no mistake in the ritual of addressing them, that there was a distinct tendency to avoid marking their sex too distinctly; and phrases such as ‘sive mas sive femina,’ ‘si deus si dea,’ are familiar to all students of the Roman religion^[228].

We may be satisfied, then, that the oldest Ceres was not simply an importation from Greece. It is curious however, 74that Ceres is not found exactly where we should expect to find her, viz. in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales^[229]. Yet this very fact may throw further light on the primitive nature of Ceres. The central figure of the Arval ritual was the nameless Dea Dia; and in a ritual entirely relating to the fruits of the earth we can fairly account for the absence of Ceres by supposing that she is there represented by the Dea Dia—in fact, that the two are identical^[230]. No one at all acquainted with Italian ideas of the gods will be surprised at this. It is surely a more reasonable hypothesis than that of Birt, who thinks that an old name for seed and bread (i. e. Ceres) was transferred to the Greek deity who dispensed seed and bread when she was introduced in Rome^[231]. It is, in fact, only the name Ceres that is wanting in the Arval ritual, not the numen itself; and this is less surprising if we assume that the names given by the earliest Romans to supernatural powers were not fixed but variable, representing no distinctly conceived personalities; in other words, that their religion was pandaemonic rather than polytheistic, though with a tendency to lend itself easily to the influence of polytheism. We may agree, then, with Preller^[232], that Ceres, with Tellus, and perhaps Ops and Acca Larentia, are different names for, and aspects of, the numen whom the Arval brothers called Dea Dia. At the same time we cannot entirely explain why the name Ceres was picked out from among these to represent the Greek Demeter. Some light may, however, be thrown on this point by studying the early history of the Ceres-cult.

The first temple of Ceres was founded, according to tradition, in consequence of a famine in the year 496 B.C., in obedience to a Sibylline oracle^[233]. It was at the foot of the Aventine, by the Circus Maximus^[234], and was dedicated on April 19, 493, to Ceres, Liber and Libera, representing Demeter, Dionysus, 75and Persephone.^[235] Thus from the outset the systematized cult of Ceres in the city was not Roman but Greek. The temple itself was adorned in Greek style instead of the Etruscan usual at this period^[236]. How is all this to be accounted for?

Let us notice in the first place that from the very foundation of the temple it is in the closest way connected with the plebs. The year of its dedication is that of the first secession of the plebs and of the establishment of the tribuni and aediles plebis^[237]. The two events are connected by the fact, repeatedly stated, that any one violating the sacrosanctitas of the tribune was to be held sacer Cereri^[238]; we are also told that the fines imposed by tribunes were spent on this temple^[239]. It was under the care of the plebeian aediles, and was to them what the temple of Saturnus was to the quaestors^[240]. Its position was in the plebeian quarter, and at the foot of the Aventine, which in B.C. 456 is said to have become the property of the plebs^[241].

Now it can hardly be doubted that the choice of Ceres (with her fellow deities of the trias), as the goddess whose temple should serve as a centre for the plebeian community, had some definite meaning. That meaning must be found in the traditions of famine and distress which we read of as immediately following the expulsion of Tarquinius. These traditions have often been put aside as untrustworthy^[242], and may indeed be so in regard to details; but there is some reason for thinking them to have had a foundation of fact, if we can but accept the other tradition of the foundation of the temple and its connexion 76with the plebs. It is likely enough that under Tarquinius the population was increased by ‘outsiders’ employed on his great buildings. Under pressure from the attack of enemies, and from a sudden aristocratic reaction, this population, we may guess, was thrown out of work, deprived of a raison d’être, and starved^[243]; finally rescuing itself by a secession, which resulted in the institution of its officers, tribunes and aediles, the latter of whom some to have been charged with the duty of looking after the corn-supply^[244].

How the corn-supply was cared for we cannot tell for certain; but here again is a tradition which fits in curiously with what we know of the temple and its worship, though it has been rejected by the superfluous ingenuity of modern German criticism. Livy tells us that in B.C. 492, the year after the dedication of the temple, corn was brought from Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily to relieve a famine^[245]. We are not obliged to believe in the purchase of corn at Syracuse at so early a date, though it is not impossible; but if we remember that the decorations and ritual of the temple were Greek beyond doubt, we get a singular confirmation of the tradition in outline which has not been sufficiently noticed. If it was founded in 493, placed under plebeian officers, and closely connected with the plebs; if its rites and decorations were Greek from the beginning; we cannot afford to discard a tradition telling us of a commercial connexion with Greek cities, the object of which was to relieve a starving plebeian population.

And surely there is nothing strange in the supposition that 77Greek influence gained ground, not so much with the patricians who had their own outfit of religious armour, but with the plebs who had no share in the sacra of their betters, and with the Etruscan dynasty which favoured the plebs^[246]. We may hesitate to assent to Mommsen’s curious assertion that the merchants of that day were none other than the great patrician landholders^[247]; we may rather be disposed to conjecture that it was the more powerful plebeians, incapable of holding large areas of public land, who turned their attention to commerce, and came in contact with the Greeks of Italy and Sicily. The position of the plebeian quarter along the Tiber bank, and near the spot where the quays of Rome have always been, may possibly point in the same direction^[248].

To return to the Cerealia of April 19. We have still to notice a relic of apparently genuine Italian antiquity which survived in it down to Ovid’s time, and may be taken as evidence that there was a real Roman substratum on which the later Greek ritual was superimposed.

Every one who reads Ovid’s account of the Cerealia will be struck by his statement that on the 19th it was the practice to fasten burning brands to the tails of foxes and set them loose to run in the Circus Maximus^[249]:

He tells a charming story to explain the custom, learnt from an old man of Carseoli, an Aequian town, where he was seeking information while writing the Fasti. A boy of twelve years’ old caught a vixen fox which had done damage to the farm, and tied it up in straw and hay. This he set on fire, but the fox escaped and burnt the crops. Hence a law at Carseoli forbidding—something about foxes, which the 78corruption of the MSS. has obscured for us^[250]. Then he concludes:

We are, of course, reminded of Samson burning the corn of the Philistines^[251]; and it is probable that the story in each case is a myth explanatory of some old practice like the one Ovid describes at Rome. But what the practice meant it is not very easy to see. Preller has his explanation ready^[252]; it was a ‘sinnbildliche Erinnerung’ of the robigo (i. e. ‘red fox’), which was to be feared and guarded against at this time of year. Mannhardt thinks rather of the corn-foxes or corn-spirits of France and Germany, of which he gives many instances^[253]. If the foxes were corn spirits, one does not quite see why they should have brands fastened to their tails^[254]. No exactly parallel practice seems to be forthcoming, and the fox does not appear elsewhere in ancient Italian or Greek folk-tales, as far as I can discover. All that can be said is that the fox’s tail seems to have been an object of interest, and possibly to have had some fertilizing power^[255], and some curious relation to ears of corn. Prof. Gubernatis believes this tail to have been a phallic symbol^[256]. We need not accept his explanation, but we may be grateful to him for a modern Italian folk-tale, from the region of Leghorn and the Maremma, in which a fox is frightened away by chickens which carry each in its beak an 79ear of millet; the fox is told that these ears are all foxes’ tails, and runs for it.

Here we must leave this puzzle^[257]; but whoever cares to read Ovid’s lines about his journey towards his native Pelignian country, his turning into the familiar lodging—

and the tales he heard there—among them that of the fox—will find them better worth reading than the greater part of the Fasti.

PAR[ILIA]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN.)

ROMA COND[ITA] FERIAE CORONATIS OM[NIBUS]. (CAER.)

N[ATALIS] URBIS. CIRCENSES MISSUS XXIV. (PHILOC.)

[A note in Praen. is hopelessly mutilated, with the exception of the words IGNES and PRINCIPIO AN[NI PASTORICII^[259]?]]

The Parilia^[260], at once one of the oldest and best attested festivals of the whole year, is at the same time the one whose features have been most clearly explained by the investigations of parallels among other races.

The first point to notice is that the festival was both public and private, urban and rustic^[261]. Ovid clearly distinguishes 80the two; lines 721-734 deal with the urban festival, 735-782 with the rustic. The explanations which follow deal with both. Pales, the deity (apparently both masculine and feminine^[262]) whose name the festival bears, was, like Faunus, a common deity of Italian pasture land. A Palatium was said by Varro to have been named after Pales at Reate, in the heart of the Sabine hill-country^[263]; and though this may not go for much, the character of the Parilia, and the fact that Pales is called rusticola, pastoricia, silvicola, &c., are sufficient to show the original non-urban character of the deity. He (or she) was a shepherd’s deity of the simplest kind, and survived in Rome as little more than a name^[264] from the oldest times, when the earliest invaders drove their cattle through the Sabine mountains. Here, then, we seem to have a clear example of a rite which was originally a rustic one, and survived as such, while at the same time one local form of it was kept up in the great city, and had become entangled with legend and probably altered in some points of ritual. We will take the rustic form first.

Here we may distinguish in Ovid’s account^[265] the following ritualistic acts.

1. The sheep-fold^[266] was decked with green boughs and a great wreath was hung on the gate:

With this Mannhardt^[267] aptly compares the like concomitants of the midsummer fires in North Germany, Scotland, and England. In Scotland, for example, before the bonfires were kindled on midsummer eve, the houses were decorated with 81foliage brought from the woods^[268]. The custom of decoration at special seasons, May-day, mid-summer, harvest, and Christmas, is even now, with the exception of midsummer, universal, and is probably descended from these primitive rites, by which our ancestors sought in some mysterious way to influence the working of the powers of vegetation.

2. At the earliest glimmer of daybreak the shepherd purified the sheep. This was done by sprinkling and sweeping the fold; then a fire was made of heaps of straw, olive-branches, and laurel, to give good omen by the crackling, and through this apparently the shepherds leapt, and the flocks were driven^[269]. For this we have, of course, numerous parallels from all parts of the world. Burning sulphur was also used:

3. After this the shepherd brought offerings to Pales, of whom there may perhaps have been in the farmyard a rude image made of wood^[271]; among these were baskets of millet and cakes of the same, pails of milk, and other food of appropriate kinds. The meal which followed the shepherd himself appears to have shared with Pales^[272]. Then he prays to the deity to avert all evil from himself and his flocks; whether he or they have unwittingly trespassed on sacred ground and caused the nymphs or fauni to fly from human eyes; or have disturbed the sacred fountains, and used branches of a sacred tree for secular ends. In these petitions the genuine spirit of Italian 82religion—the awe of the unknown, the fear of committing unwittingly some act that may bring down wrath upon you—is most vividly brought out in spite of the Greek touches and names which are introduced. He then goes on to his main object^[273]:

This prayer must be said four times over^[274], the shepherd looking to the east and wetting his hands with the morning dew^[275]. The position, the holy water, and the prayer in its substance, though now addressed to the Virgin, have all descended to the Catholic shepherd of the Campagna.

4. Then a bowl is to be brought, a wooden antique bowl apparently^[276], from which milk and purple sapa, i. e. heated wine, may be drunk, until the drinker feels the influence of the fumes, and when he is well set he may leap over the burning heaps:

The Parilia of the urbs was celebrated in much the same way in its main features; but the day was reckoned as the 83birthday of Rome, and doubtless on this account it came under the influence of priestly organization^[278]. It is connected with two other very ancient festivals: that of the Fordicidia and that of the ‘October horse.’ The blood which streamed from the head of the horse sacrificed on the Ides of October was kept by the Vestals in the Penus Vestae, and mixed with the ashes of the unborn calves burnt at the Fordicidia; and the mixture seems to have been thrown upon heaps of burning bean-straw to make it smoke, while over the smoke and flames men and women leaped on the Palatine Hill^[279]. The object was of course purification; Ovid calls the blood, ashes, and straw februa casta, i. e. holy agents of purification, and adds in allusion to their having been kept by the Vestals:

Ovid had himself taken part in the rite; had fetched the suffimen, and leaped three times through the flames, his hands sprinkled with dew from a laurel branch. Whether the februa were considered to have individually any special significance or power, it is hard to say. Mannhardt, who believed the ‘October horse’ to be a corn-demon, thought that the burning of its blood symbolized the renewal of its life in the spring, while the ashes thrown into the fire signified the safe passage of the growing crops through the heat of the summer^[280]; but about this so judicious a writer is naturally not disposed to dogmatize. We can, however, be pretty sure that the purification was supposed to carry with it protection from evil influences both for man and beast, and also to aid the growth of vegetation. The theory of Mannhardt, adopted by Mr. Frazer, that the whole class of ceremonies to which the 84Parilia clearly belongs, i. e. the Easter and Midsummer fires and Need-fires of central and northern Europe, may best be explained as charms to procure sunshine,^[281] has much to be said for it, but does not seem to find any special support in the Roman rite.

It may be noted in conclusion that a custom of the same kind, and one perhaps connected with a cult of the sun,^[282] took place not far from Rome, at Mount Soracte; at what time of year we do not know. On this hill there was a worship of Apollo Soranus,^[283] a local deity, to which was attached a kind of guild of worshippers called Hirpi Sorani, or wolves of Soranus;^[284] and of these we may guess, from the legend told of their origin, that in order to avert pestilence, &c., they dressed or behaved themselves like wolves.^[285] Also on a particular day, perhaps the summer solstice, these Hirpi ran through the flames, ‘super ambustam ligni struem ambulantes non aduruntur,’^[286] and on this account were excused by a senatus consultum from all military or other service. A striking parallel with this last feature is quoted by Mannhardt, from Mysore, where the Harawara are degraded Brahmins who act as priests in harvest-time, and make a living by running through the flames unhurt with naked soles: but in this case there seems to be no animal representation. Mannhardt tries to explain the Hirpi as dramatic representations of the Corn-wolf or vegetation spirit.^[287] On the other hand, it is possible to consider them as survivals of an original clan who worshipped 85the wolf as a totem^[288]; a view adopted by Mr. Lang^[289], who compares the bear-maidens of Artemis at Brauron in Attica. But the last word has yet to be said about these obscure animalistic rites.

VEIN[ALIA] (CAER.) VIN[ALIA] (MAFF. PRAEN. ESQ.)

Praen. has a mutilated note beginning IO[VI], and ending with [CUM LATINI BELLO PREME]RENTUR A RUTULIS, QUIA MEZENTIUS REX ETRUS[CO]RUM PACISCEBATUR, SI SUBSIDIO VENISSET, OMNIUM ANNORUM VINI FRUCTUM. (Cp. Festus, 65 and 374, where it appears that libations of all new wine were made to Jupiter.)

VENERI (CAER.)

[V]EBERI ERUC. [EXTR]A PORTAM COLLIN[AM]. (ARV.)

This day was generally known as Vinalia Priora, as distinguished from the Vinalia Rustica of August 19. Both days were believed to be sacred to Venus^[291]; the earlier one, according to Ovid, was the foundation-day of the temple of Venus Erycina, with which he connected the legend of Aeneas and Mezentius. But as both Varro and Verrius are agreed that the days were sacred, not to Venus but to Jupiter^[292], we may leave the legend alone and content ourselves with asking how Venus came into the connexion.

The most probable supposition is that this day being, as 86Ovid implies, the dies natalis of one of the temples of Venus^[293], the Vinalia also came to be considered as sacred to the goddess. The date of the foundation was 181 B.C., exactly at a time when many new worships, and especially Greek ones, were being introduced into Rome^[294]. That of the Sicilian Aphrodite, under the name of Venus, seems to have become at once popular with its Graecus ritus and lascivia maior^[295]; and the older connexion of the festival with Jupiter tended henceforward to disappear. It must be noted, however, that the day of the Vinalia Rustica in August was also the dies natalis of one if not two other temples of Venus^[296], and one of these was as old as the year B.C. 293. Thus we can hardly avoid the conclusion that there was, even at an early date, some connexion in the popular mind between the goddess and wine. The explanation is perhaps to be found in the fact that Venus was specially a deity of gardens, and therefore no doubt of vineyards^[297]. An interesting inscription from Pompeii confirms this, and attests the connexion of Venus with wine and gardens, as it is written on a wine-jar^[298]:

The Vinalia, then, both in April and August, was really and originally sacred to Jupiter. The legendary explanation is given by Ovid in 11. 877-900. Whatever the true explanation may have been, the fact can be illustrated from the ritual employed; for it was the Flamen Dialis^[299] who ‘vindemiam auspicatus est,’ i. e. after sacrificing plucked the first grapes. Whether this auspicatio took place on either of the Vinalia has indeed been doubted, for even August 19 would hardly seem 87to suit the ceremony Varro describes^[300]; but the fact that it was performed by the priest of Jupiter is sufficient for our purpose.

Of this day, April 23, we may guess that it was the one on which the wine-skins were first opened, and libations from them made to Jupiter. These are probably the libations about which Plutarch^[301] asks ‘Why do they pour much wine from the temple of Venus on the Veneralia’ (i. e. Vinalia)? The same libations are attested by Verrius: ‘Vinalia diem festum habebant quo die vinum novum Iovi libabant’^[302]. After the libation the wine was tasted, as we learn from Pliny^[303]; and it seems probable that it was brought from the country into Rome for this purpose only a few days before. Varro has preserved an interesting notice which he saw posted in vineyards at Tusculum: ‘In Tusculanis hortis (MSS. sortis) est scriptum: ‘Vinum novum ne vehatur in urbem ante quam vinalia kalentur’^[304]; i. e. wine-growers were warned that the new wine was not to be brought into the city until the Vinalia had been proclaimed on the Nones. It must, however, be added that this notice may have had reference to the Vinalia in August; for Verrius, if he is rightly reported by Paulus^[305], gives August 19 as the day on which the wine might be brought into Rome. Paulus may be wrong, and have confused the two Vinalia^[306]; but in that case we remain in the dark as to what was done at the Vinalia Rustica, unless indeed we explain it as a rite intended to secure the vintage that was to follow against malignant influences. This would seem to be indicated by Pliny (H. N. 18. 284), where he classes this August festival with the Robigalia and Floralia^[307], and further on quotes Varro to prove 88that its object was to appease the storms (i. e. to be expected in September).

As regards the connexion of the vine-culture with Jupiter, it should be observed that the god is not spoken of as Jupiter Liber, but simply Jupiter; and though the vine was certainly introduced into Italy from Greece, we need not assume that Dionysus, coming with it, was from the beginning attached to or identified with Jupiter. The gift of wine might naturally be attributed to the great god of the air, light, and heat; the Flamen Dialis who ‘vindemiam auspicatus est’ was not the priest of Jupiter Liber; nor does the aetiological legend, in which the Latins avoid the necessity of yielding their first-fruits to the Etruscan tyrant Mezentius by dedicating them to Jupiter, point to any other than the protecting deity of Latium.^[308]

[ROB]IGALIA. (CAER. ESQ. MAFF. PRAEN.)

Note in Praen: FERIAE ROBIGO VIA CLAUDIA AD MILLIARIUM V NE ROBIGO FRUMENTIS NOCEAT. SACRIFICIUM ET LUDI CURSORIBUS MAIORIBUS MINORIBUSQUE FIUNT. FESTUS EST PUERORUM LENONIORUM, QUIA PROXIMUS SUPERIOR MERETRICUM EST.

Robigo means red rust or mildew which attacks cereals when the ear is beginning to be formed^[309], and which is better known and more dreaded on the continent than with us. This destructive disease is not caused by the sun’s heat, as Pliny^[310] 89tells us was the notion of some Italians, but by damp acting in conjunction with a certain height of temperature, as Pliny himself in fact explains it.

Robigus^[311] is the spirit who works in the mildew; and it has been conjectured that he was a form or indigitation of Mars^[312], since Tertullian tells us that ‘Marti et Robigini Numa ludos instituit’^[313]. This is quite consistent with all we know of the Mars of the farm-worship, who is invoked to avert evil simply because he can be the creator of it^[314]. The same feature is found in the worship of Apollo, who had at Rhodes the cult-title ἐρυθίβιος^[315], or Apollo of the blight, as elsewhere he is Apollo Smintheus, i. e. the power that can bring and also avert the pest of field-mice.

Robigus had a grove of his own at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia; and Ovid relates in pretty verses how, as he was returning from Nomentum (doubtless by way of his own gardens, which were at the junction of the Via Claudia with the Via Flaminia near the Milvian bridge^[316]), he met the Flamen Quirinalis with the exta of a dog and a sheep to offer to the god^[317]. He joined the procession, which was apparently something quite new to him, and witnessed the ceremony, noting the meri patera, the turis acerra, and the rough linen napkin^[318], at the priest’s right hand. He versified the prayer which he heard, and which is not unlike that which Cato directs the husbandman to address to Mars in the lustration of the farm^[319]:

Ovid then asked the flamen why a dog—nova victima—was sacrificed, and was told that the dangerous Dog-star was in the ascendant^[320]:

In this, however, both he and the priest were certainly mistaken. Sirius does not rise, but disappears on April 25, at sunset; and it is almost certain that the sacrifice of the dog had nothing to do with the star. The real meaning of the choice of victim was unknown both to priest and poet: but modern research has made a reasonable attempt to recover it^[321].

We are told^[322] of a sacrifice of reddish sucking whelps, and of augury made from their exta, which must have been closely connected with the Robigalia, if not (in later times at least) identified with it. Originally it was not on a fixed day, as is proved by an extract from the commentarii pontificum quoted by Pliny^[323]; but it is quite possible that for convenience, as the religio of the urbs got more and more dissociated from the agriculture in which it had its origin, the date was fixed for April 25—the rites of the Robigalia being of the same kind, and the date suitable. The whelps were red or reddish; and from the language of Festus, quoting Ateius Capito, we gather 91that this colour was supposed to resemble that of the corn when ripe: ‘Rufae canes immolabantur, ut fruges flavescentes ad maturitatem perducerentur’ (p. 285). We should indeed naturally have expected that the rufous colour was thought to resemble the red mildew, as Mannhardt explains it^[324]; but we do not know for certain that these puppies were offered to Robigus. In any case, however, we may perhaps see in them an animal representation of the corn, and in the rite a piece of ‘sympathetic magic’^[325], the object of which was to bring the corn to its golden perfection, or to keep off the robigo, or both. If we knew more about the dog-offering at the grove of Robigus, we might find that it too, if not indeed identical with the augurium, had a similar intention.

The red mildew was at times so terrible a scourge that the Robigalia must in early Rome, when the population lived on the corn grown near the city, have been a festival of very real meaning. But later on it became obscured, and gave way to the races mentioned in the note in the Praenestine calendar^[326], and under the later empire to the Christian litania maior, the original object of which was also the safety of the crops^[327]. The 25th is at present St. Mark’s day.

LOEDI FLORÆ (CAER.) LUDI FLORÆ. (MAFF. PRAEN.)

FLORAE (VEN.).

On the intervening days were also ludi (C. I. L. 317).

Note in Praen. (Apr. 28): EODEM DIE AEDIS FLORAE, QUAE REBUS FLORESCENDIS PRAEEST, DEDICATA EST PROPTER STERILITATEM FRUGUM.

92This was not a very ancient festival and is not marked in the Calendars in those large letters which are believed to indicate extreme antiquity^[328]. Its history seems to be as follows: in 238 B.C. in consequence of a dearth, the Sibylline Books were consulted, and games in honour of Flora were held for the first time by plebeian aediles^[329]; also a temple was dedicated to her ad circum maximum on April 28 of that year^[330]. There seems to be a certain connexion between the accounts of the institution of the Floralia and the Cerialia. Dearth was the alleged cause in each case; and the position of the temple of Flora near that of Ceres: the foundation by plebeian magistrates, in this case the two Publicii^[331], who as aediles were able to spend part of the fines exacted from defaulting holders of ager publicus on this object^[332]: and the coarse character of the games as Ovid describes them, all seem to show that the foundation was a plebeian one, like that of the Cerialia^[333].

There may, however, have been something in the nature of ludi before this date and at the same time of year, but not of a regular or public character. Flora was beyond doubt an old Italian deity^[334], probably closely related to Ceres and Venus. There was a Flamen Floralis of very old standing^[335]; and Flora is one of the deities to whom piacula were offered by the Fratres 93Arvales^[336]—a list beginning with Janus and ending with Vesta. There is no doubt, then, that there was a Flora-cult in Rome long before the foundation of the temple and the games in 238; and though its character may have changed under the influence of the Sibylline books, we may be able to glean some particulars as to its original tendency.

In the account of Ovid and from other hints we gather—

1. That indecency was let loose^[337] at any rate on the original day of the ludi (April 28), which were in later times extended to May 3. The numen of Flora, says Ovid, was not strict. Drunkenness was the order of the day, and the usual results followed:

The prostitutes of Rome hailed this as their feast-day, as well as the Vinalia on the 23rd; and if we may trust a story told by Valerius Maximus^[338], Cato the younger withdrew from the theatre rather than behold the mimae unclothe themselves, though he would not interfere with the custom. Flora herself, like Acca Larentia, was said by late writers to have been a harlot whose gains enabled her to leave money for the ludi^[339]. These characteristics of the festival were no doubt developed under the influence of luxury in a large city, and grew still more objectionable under the Empire^[340]. But it is difficult to believe that such practices would have grown up as they did at this particular time of year, had there not been some previous customs of the kind existing before the ludi were regularly instituted.

2. We find another curious custom belonging to the last days of the ludi, which became common enough under the Empire^[341], but may yet have had an origin in the cult of Flora. 94Hares and goats were let loose in the Circus Maximus on these days. Ovid asks Flora:

and gets the answer:

If we take this answer as at least appropriate, we may add to it the reflection that hares and goats are prolific animals and also that they are graminivorous. Flora as a goddess of fertility and bloom could have nothing in common with fierce carnivora. But we are also reminded of the foxes that were let loose in the Circus at the Cerialia^[343], and may see in these beasts as in the foxes animal representations of the spirit of fertility.

3. Another custom is possibly significant in something the same way. From a passage in Persius we learn that vetches, beans, and lupines were scattered among the people in the circus^[344]. The commentators explain this as meaning that they were thrown simply to be scrambled for as food; and we know that other objects besides eatables were thrown on similar occasions, at any rate at a later time^[345]. But it is noticeable that among these objects were medals with obscene representations on them; and putting two and two together it is not unreasonable to guess that the original custom had a meaning connected with fructification. Dr. Mannhardt^[346] has collected a very large number of examples of the practice of sprinkling and throwing all kinds of grain, including rice, peas, beans, &c., from all parts of the world, in the marriage rite and at the birth of children; amply sufficient to prove that the custom is symbolic of fertility. Bearing in mind the time of year, the nature of Flora, the character of the April rites generally, and 95the occurrence of the women’s cult of the Bona Dea on May 1, viz. one of the days of the ludi, we may perhaps conjecture that the custom in question was a very old one—far older than the organized games—and had reference to the fertility both of the earth and of man himself^[347].

A brief account may be here given of the great Latin festival which usually in historical times took place in April. Though it was not held at Rome, but on the Alban Mount, it was under the direct supervision of the Roman state, and was in reality a Roman festival. The consuls on their entrance upon office on the Ides of March had to fix and announce the date of it^[348]; and when in 153 B.C. the day of entrance was changed to January 1, the date of the festival does not seem to have been changed to suit it. The consuls must be present themselves, leaving a praefectus urbi at Rome^[349]; or in case of the compulsory absence of both consuls a dictator might be appointed Feriarum Latinarum causa. Only when the festival was over could they leave Rome for their provinces.

It was therefore a festival of the highest importance to the Roman state. But the ritual will show that it must in fact have been much older than that state as we know it in historical times; it was a common festival of the most ancient Latin communities^[350], celebrated on the lofty hill which arose in their midst, where dwelt the great protecting deity of their race. At what date Rome became the presiding city at the festival we do not know. The foundation of the temple on the hill was 96ascribed to the Tarquinii, and this tradition seems to be borne out by the character of the foundations discovered there, which resemble those of the Capitoline temple^[351]. No doubt the Tarquinii may have renovated the cult or even given it an extended significance; but the Roman presidency must conjecturally be placed still further back. Perhaps no festival, Greek or Roman, carries us over such a vast period of time as this; its features betray its origin in the pastoral age, and it continued in almost uninterrupted grandeur till the end of the third century A.D., or even later^[352].

The ritual as known to us was as follows^[353]. When the magistrates or (their deputies) of all the Latin cities taking part had assembled at the temple, the Roman consul offered a libation of milk, while the deputies from the other cities brought sheep, cheeses, or other such offerings. But the characteristic rite was the slaughter of a pure white heifer that had never felt the yoke. This sacrifice was the duty of the consul, who acted on behalf of the whole number of cities. When it was concluded, the flesh of the victim was divided amongst all the deputies and consumed by them. To be left out of this common meal, or sacrament, would be equivalent to being excluded from communion with the god and the Latin league, and the desire to obtain the allotted flesh is more than once alluded to^[354]. A general festivity followed the sacrifice, while oscilla, or little puppets, were hung from the branches of trees as at the Paganalia^[355]. As usual in Italy, the least oversight in the ceremony or evil omen made it necessary to begin it all over again; and this occasionally happened^[356]. Lastly, during the festival there was a truce between all the cities, and it 97would seem that the alliance between Rome and the Latins was yearly renewed on the day of the Feriae^[357].

Some of the leading characteristics of the Italian Jupiter will be considered further on^[358]. But this festival may teach us that we are here in the presence of the oldest and finest religious conception of the Latin race, which yearly acknowledges its common kinship of blood and seals it by partaking in the common meal of a sacred victim, thus entering into communion with the god, the victim, and each other^[359]. The offerings are characteristic rather of a pastoral than an agricultural age, and suggest an antiquity that is fully confirmed by the ancient utensils dug up on the Alban Mount^[360]. As Helbig has pointed out, the absence of any mention of wine proves that the origin of the festival must be dated earlier than the introduction of the grape into Italy. The white victim may be a reminiscence of some primitive white breed of cattle. The common meal of the victim’s flesh is a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and were never slain except on the solemn annual occasions when the clan renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn sacrament^[361].

As Rome absorbed Latium, so Jupiter Latiaris gave way before the great god of the Capitol, who is the symbol of the later victorious and imperial Rome; but the god of the Alban hill and his yearly festival continued to recall the early share of the Latins in the rise of their leading city, long after the population of their towns had been so terribly thinned that some of them could hardly find a surviving member to represent them at the festival and take their portion of the victim^[362].

Was the name of this month taken from a deity Maia, or had it originally only a signification of growing or increasing, such as we might expect in a word derived from the same root as maior, maiestas, &c.? The following passage of Macrobius will show how entirely the Roman scholars were at sea in their answer to this question^[363]:

‘Maium Romulus tertium posuit. De cuius nomine inter auctores lata dissensio est. Nam Fulvius Nobilior in Fastis quos in aede Herculis Musarum posuit^[364] Romulum dicit postquam populum in maiores iunioresque diuisit, ut altera pars consilio altera armis rem publicam tueretur, in honorem utriusque partis hunc Maium, sequentem Iunium mensem uocasse^[365]. Sunt qui hunc mensem ad nostros fastos a Tusculanis transisse commemorent, apud quos nunc quoque uocatur deus Maius, qui est Iuppiter, a magnitudine scilicet ac maiestate dictus^[366]. Cingius^[367] mensem nominatum putat a Maia quam Vulcani dicit uxorem, argumentoque utitur quod flamen Vulcanalis Kalendis Maiis huic deae rem diuinam facit. Sed Piso uxorem Vulcani Maiestam non Maiam dicit uocari. Contendunt alii Maiam Mercurii matrem mensi nomen dedisse, hinc maxime probantes quod hoc mense mercatores omnes 99Maiae pariter Mercurioque sacrificant^[368]. Adfirmant quidam, quibus Cornelius Labeo consentit, hanc Maiam cui mense Maio res diuina celebratur terram esse hoc adeptam nomen a magnitudine, sicut et Mater Magna in sacris uocatur adsertionemque aestimationis suae etiam hinc colligunt quod sus praegnans ei mactatur, quae hostia propria est terrae. Et Mercurium ideo illi in sacris adiungi dicunt quia uox nascenti homini terrae contactu datur, scimus autem Mercurium uocis et sermonis potentem. Auctor est Cornelius Labeo huic Maiae id est terrae aedem Kalendis Maiis dedicatam sub nomine Bonae Deae et eandem esse Bonam Deam et terram ex ipso ritu occultiore sacrorum doceri posse confirmat. Hanc eandem Bonam deam Faunamque et Opem et Fatuam pontificum libris indigitari, &c.’

It is clear from this passage that the Romans themselves were not agreed, either in the case of May or June, that the name of the month was derived from a deity. No Roman scholar doubted that Martius was derived from Mars, the characteristic god of the Roman race; but Maia was a deity known apparently only to the priests and the learned. Had she been a popular one, what need could there have been to question so obvious an etymology? And if she were an obscure one, how could she have given her name to a month? As a matter of fact March is the only month of which we can be sure that it was named after a god. Even January is doubtful, June still more so. The natural assumption about this latter word would be that it comes from Juno, more especially as we find in Latium the words Junonius and Junonalis as names of months^[369]. But if Junius came from Juno, it must have come by the dropping out of a syllable; and this, in the case of a long and accented o, would be at least unlikely to happen^[370]. Nor can we discover any sufficient reason why the month of June should be called after Juno; none at any rate such as accounts for the connexion of Mars with the initial month of the year. This is enough to show 100that the derivation of June from Juno must be left doubtful; and if so, certainly that of May from Maia. In the case of this month, not only does the natural meaning of mensis Maius suit well as following the mensis Aprilis, but there is no cult of a deity Maia which is found throughout the month.

Any one who reads the passage of Macrobius with some knowledge of the Roman theological system will hardly fail to conclude that Maia is only a priestly indigitation of another deity, and that the name thus invented was simply taken from the name of the month as explained above. This deity was more generally known, as Macrobius implies, by the name Bona Dea, and her temple was dedicated on the Kalends of May.

It is difficult to characterize the position of the month of May in the religious calendar. It was to some extent no doubt a month of purification. At the Lemuria the house was purified of hostile ghosts; the curious ceremony of the Argei on the Ides is called by Plutarch the greatest of the purifications; and at the end of the month took place the lustratio of the growing crops. We note too that it was considered ill-omened to marry in May, as it still is in many parts of Europe. The agricultural operations of the month were not of a marked character. Much work had indeed to be done in oliveyards and vineyards; some crops had to be hoed and cleaned, and the hay-harvest probably began in the latter part of the month. In the main it was a time of somewhat anxious expectation and preparation for the harvest to follow; and this falls in fairly well with the general character of its religious rites.

LAR[IBUS]. (VEN.) L——. (ESQ.)

This was the day on which, according to Ovid^[371], an altar and ‘parva signa’ had been erected to the Lares praestites. They were originally of great antiquity, but had fallen into decay in Ovid’s time:

101Ovid himself had apparently not seen the signa, though he looked for them; and no doubt he took from Varro the description he gives. They had the figure of a dog at their feet^[373], and, according to Plutarch, were clothed in dogs’ skins. Both Ovid and Plutarch explained the dog as symbolizing their watch over the city; though Plutarch, following, as he says, certain Romans, preferred to think of them rather as evil demons searching out and punishing guilt like dogs. The mention of the skins is very curious, and we can hardly separate it from the numerous other instances in which the images of deities are known to have been clothed in the skins of victims sacrificed to them^[374]. We may indeed fairly conclude that the Lares were chthonic deities, and as such were originally appeased, like Hekate in Greece^[375], by the sacrifice of dogs. We have already had one example of the dog used as a victim^[376]. Two others are mentioned by Plutarch^[377]; in one case the deity was the obscure Genita Mana, and in the other the unknown god of the Lupercalia, both of which belong in all probability to the same stratum of Italian religious antiquity as the Lares. Whether we should go further, and infer from the use of the skins that the Lares were originally worshipped in the form of dogs^[378], is a question I must leave undecided; the evidence is very scanty. There is no trace of any connexion with the dog in the cult of the Lares domestici^[379], or Compitales.

This is also the traditional day of the dedication of a temple to the Bona Dea, on the slopes of the Aventine, under a big sacred rock. It is thus described by Ovid^[380]:

The allusion to Remus fixes the site on the Aventine. The date is uncertain^[381]; so too the alleged foundation by Claudia, which may be only a reflection from the story of the part played by a Claudia in the introduction of the Magna Mater Idaea to Rome^[382]. The temple, as Ovid says, was restored by Livia, in accordance with the policy of her husband, also at an unknown date.

Of the cult belonging to this temple we have certain traces, which also help us to some vague conception of the nature of the deity. It should be observed that though in one essential particular, viz. the exclusion of men, this cult was similar to that of December, it must have been quite distinct from it, as the latter took place, not in a temple, but in the house of a magistrate cum imperio^[383].

1. The temple was cared for, and the cult celebrated, by women only^[384]. There was an old story that Hercules, when driving the cattle of Geryon, asked for water by the cave of Cacus of the women celebrating the festival of the goddess, and was refused, because the women’s festival was going on, and men were not allowed to use their drinking-vessels; and that this led to the corresponding exclusion of women from the worship of Hercules^[385]. The myth obviously arose out of the practice. The exclusion of men points to the earth-nature 103of the Bona Dea; the same was the case in the worship of the Athenian Demeter Thesmophoros. The earth seems always to be spiritualized as feminine even among savage peoples^[386], and the reason of the exclusion of men is not difficult to conjecture, just as the exclusion of women from the worship of Hercules is explained by the fact that Hercules represents the male principle in the ancient Roman religion^[387].

2. Macrobius^[388] tells us that wine could not be brought into the temple suo nomine, but only under the name of milk, and that the vase in which it was carried was called mellarium, i. e. a vase for honey. A legend grew up to account for the custom, to which we shall refer again, that Faunus had beaten his daughter Fauna (i. e. Bona Dea) with a rod of myrtle because she would not yield to his incestuous love or drink the wine he pressed on her^[389]. This may indicate a survival from the time when the herdsman used no wine in sacred rites, but milk and honey only; Pliny tells us of such a time^[390], and his evidence is confirmed by the poets. In any case milk would be the appropriate offering to the Earth-mother, and it is hard to see why it should have been changed to wine, unless it were that life in the city and Greek influence altered the character both of the Bona Dea and her worshippers. The really rustic deities had milk offered them, e. g. Silvanus, Pales, and Ceres. The general inference from this survival is that the Bona Dea was originally of the same nature with these deities, but lost her rusticity when she became part of an organized city worship.

3. Myrtle was not allowed in this temple; hence the myth that Faunus beat his daughter with a myrtle rod^[391]. But could 104the exclusion of myrtle by itself have suggested the beating? Dr. Mannhardt answers in the negative, and conjectures that there must have been some kind of beating in the cult itself, which gave rise to the story^[392]. Dr. Mannhardt never made a conjecture without a large collection of facts on which to base it; and here he depends upon a number of instances from Greece and Northern Europe, in which man or woman, or some object such as the image of a deity, is whipped with rods, nettles, strips of leather, &c., in order, as it would seem, to produce fertility and drive away hostile influences. We shall see the same peculiarity occurring at the Lupercalia in February^[393], where its object and meaning are almost beyond doubt. Many of these practices occur, it is worth noting, on May-day. If the Bona Dea was a representative in any sense of the fertility of women, as well as of the fructifying powers of the earth—and the two ideas seem naturally to have run together in the primitive mind—we may provisionally accept Dr. Mannhardt’s ingenious suggestion. If it be objected that as myrtle was excluded from the cult it could not have been used therein for the purpose of whipping, the answer is simply that as being invested with some mysterious power it was tabooed from ordinary use, but, like certain kinds of victims, was introduced on special and momentous occasions.

4. The temple was a kind of herbarium in which herbs were kept with healing properties^[394]. A group of interesting inscriptions shows that the Bona Dea did not confine her healing powers to cases of women, but cured the ailments of both sexes^[395]. This attribute of the goddess is borne out by the presence of snakes in her temple, the usual symbol of the medicinal art, and at the same time appropriate to the Bona Dea as an Earth-goddess^[396]. It is possible that this feature is a Greek importation; but on the whole I see no reason why 105the female ministrants of the temple should not have exercised such healing powers, or have sold or given herbs at request, even at a very early period. No doubt Greek medicinal learning became associated with it, but that the knowledge of simples was indigenous in Italy we have abundant proof^[397]; and that it should have been connected with no cult of a deity until Aesculapius was introduced from Greece, is most improbable.

5. The sacrifice mentioned is that of a porca^[398]. The pig is also the victim in the worship of Ceres, of Juno Lucina^[399] (as alternative for a lamb), and as a piacular sacrifice in the ritual of the deity of the Fratres Arvales (Dea Dia); it seems in fact, as in Greece, to be appropriate to deities of the earth and of women. There is no reason to suppose that wherever it is found it had a Greek origin; even in the cult of Ceres, which, as we saw, became early overlaid with Greek practice^[400], the pig may have been the victim before that change took place. But it is a singular fact that in the worship of the Bona Dea, either at the temple of the Aventine, or in the December rite—more probably perhaps in the latter—the victim was called by a name which looks suspiciously Greek, viz. Damium^[401]. It seems that there was a deity Damia who was worshipped here and there in Greece, and also in Southern Italy, e. g. at Tarentum, where she had a festival called Dameia^[402]. It looks as if this Greek deity had at one time migrated from Tarentum to Rome, and become engrafted upon the indigenous Bona Dea; for we are expressly told that Damia was identical with the Bona Dea, and that the priestess of the latter was called Damiatrix^[403]. Much has been written about these very obscure names, without any very definite result; but it seems to be 106generally agreed that the form of the word damiatrix indicates a high antiquity for the Graecized form of the cult, and may indeed possibly suggest an Italian origin for the whole group of names. In this uncertainty conjectures are almost useless.

We have seen enough of the cult to gain some idea of the nature of this mysterious deity, whose real name was not known, even if she had one^[404]. We need not identify her with Vesta, as some have done^[405], nor with Juno Lucina, nor with any other female deity of the class to which she seems to have belonged. She must at one time have been, whatever she afterwards became, a protective deity of the female sex, the Earth-mother^[406], a kindly and helpful, but shy and unknowable deity of fertility. The name Bona Dea is probably to be regarded as one indigitation of the Earth-spirit known by a variety of other names and appearing in a number of different phases. There is indeed a remarkable indefiniteness about the Italian female deities of this class; they never gained what we may call complete specific distinctness, but are rather half-formed species developed from a common type. They form, in fact, an excellent illustration of the nature of that earliest stratum of Roman religious belief which has been called pandaemonism—a belief in a world of spiritual powers not yet grown into the forms of individual deities, but ready at any moment, under influences either native or foreign, to take a more definite shape.

LEM[VRIA]. (VEN. MAFF.)

LEM[VRIA]. (TUSC. VEN. MAFF.)

LEM[VRIA]. (TUSC. VEN. MAFF.)

The word Lemuria indicates clearly enough some kind of worship of the dead; but we know of no such public cult on 107these three days except from the calendars. What Ovid describes as taking place at this time is a private and domestic rite performed by the head of the household^[407]; and Ovid is our only informant in regard to details. In historical times the public festival of the dead was that of the dies parentales in February, ending with the Feralia on the 21st. How, then, is it that the three days of the Lemuria appear in those large letters in the ancient calendars, which, as we have seen^[408], indicate the public festivals of the religious system of the Republic? There is no certain answer to this question. We can but guess that the Lemuria was at one time, like the Feralia, a public festival, but descended from a more ancient deposit of superstition which in historical times was buried deep beneath the civilization of a developed city life^[409]. Ovid himself implies that the Lemuria was an older festival than the Feralia^[410], and we may suppose him to be following Varro as a guide. And if we compare his account of the grotesque domestic rites of the Lemuria with those of February, which were of a systematic, cheerful, and even beautiful character, we may feel fairly sure that the latter represents the organized life of a city state, the former the ideas of an age when life was wilder and less secure, and the fear of the dead and of demons generally was a powerful factor in the minds of the people. If we may argue from Ovid’s account, to be described directly, it is not impossible that the Lemuria may have been one of those periodical expulsions of demons of which Mr. Frazer has told us so much in his Golden Bough^[411], and which are performed on behalf of the community as well as in the domestic circle amongst savage peoples. It is noticeable that the offering of food to the demons is a feature common to these practices, and that it also appears in those described by Ovid.

The difference of character in the two Roman festivals of the dead is perhaps also indicated by the fact that the days of the Lemuria are marked in the calendars with the letter N, 108while the Feralia is marked F or FP^[412]. This may perhaps point to two different views of the attitude of the dead to the living, affecting the character of the festival days; they are friendly or hostile, as they have been buried with due rites and carefully looked after, or as they have failed of these dues and are consequently angry and jealous^[413]. The latter of these attitudes is more in keeping with the notions of uncivilized man, and of a life not as yet wholly brought under the influence of the civilization of the city-state. To be more certain, however, on this point, we must try and discover the real meaning of the word lemur.

The definition given by Porphyrio is ‘Umbras vagantes hominum ante diem mortuorum atque ideo metuendas^[414].’ Nonius has the following: ‘Lemures larvae nocturnae et terrificationes imaginum et bestiarum^[415].’ From these passages it would seem that lemures and larvae mean much the same thing; on the other hand Appuleius^[416] implies that lemures is a general word for spirits after they have left the body, while those that haunt houses are especially called larvae. But on a question of this kind, the philosophical and uncritical Appuleius is not to be weighed as an authority against either Nonius or Porphyrio, who may quite possibly be here representing the learning of the Augustan age; and a perusal of the whole of his passage will show that he is simply trying to classify ghosts by the light of his own imagination. Judging from the hints of the two other scholars, we may perhaps conclude that lemures and larvae are to be distinguished as hostile ghosts from manes, the good people (as the word is generally explained), i. e. those duly buried in the city of the dead, and whom their living descendants have no need to fear so long as they pay them their due rites at the proper seasons as members of the family. And this conclusion is confirmed by the curious etymology of Ovid^[417], reproduced by Porphyrio, deriving Lemuria from Remus. 109whose violent death was supposed to have been expiated by the institution of the festival. The difficulty is to see why, if the lemures were unburied, evil, or hostile spirits, a special festival of three days should have been necessary to appease or quiet them; and I can only account for this by supposing that such spirits were especially numerous in an age of uncivilized life and constant war and violence, and that they formed a large part of the whole world of evil demons whose expulsion was periodically demanded. It may have been the case that at this particular time in May, when the days were nefasti and marriages were ill-omened, these spirits became particularly restless and needed to be laid.

Such an explanation as this of the Lemuria is on the whole preferable to that which would regard it as the original Roman festival of all the dead; for there is now abundant evidence that even in the earliest ages of Italian life the practice of orderly burial in necropoleis was universal^[418], and this is a practice that seems inconsistent with a general belief in the dead as hostile and haunting spirits.

The following is Ovid’s description of the way in which the ghosts were laid at the Lemuria by the father of a family. At midnight he rises, and with bare feet^[419] and washed hands, making a peculiar sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts, he walks through the house. He has black beans in his mouth, and these he spits out as he walks, looking the other way, and saying, ‘With these I redeem me and mine.’ Nine times he says this without looking round; then come the ghosts behind him, and gather up the beans unseen. He proceeds to wash again and to make a noise with brass vessels; and after nine times repeating the formula ‘manes^[420] exite paterni,’ he at last looks round, and the ceremony is over.

110The only point in this quaint bit of ritual which need detain us is the use of beans. We have had bean-straw used at the Parilia, and we shall find that beans were also used at the festival of the dead in February. Assuredly it is not easy to see what could have made them into such valuable ‘medicine.’ Beans were not a newly discovered vegetable. Their exclusion from the rites of Demeter must have been of great antiquity, and the notions of the Pythagoreans about them were probably based on very ancient popular superstitions^[421]. No one, as far as I know, has as yet successfully solved the problem why beans had so strange a religious character about them^[422]; they probably were an ancient symbol of fertility, but it is impossible now to discover how or why the ideas grouped themselves around them, which we so constantly find both in Greece and Italy. If we ask why the ghosts picked them up, or were supposed to do so, there is some reason for believing that by eating them they might possibly hope to get a new lease of life^[423]. Whatever was the real basis of the superstition, it was a widely spread one, and ramified in more than one direction; the Roman priest of Jupiter, for example, might not touch beans nor even mention them^[424]. In his case the taboo was no doubt very old, but might have grown out of some such practice as that just described, all things ill-omened and mysterious being carefully kept out of his reach.

The days from May 7 to 14 were occupied by the Vestal Virgins in preparing the mola salsa, or sacred salt-cake, for use at the Vestalia in June, on the Ides of September, and at the Lupercalia^[425]. This was made from the first ears of standing corn in 111a primitive fashion by the three senior Vestals, and is no doubt, like most of their ritual, a relic of the domestic functions of the daughters of the family. But we must postpone further consideration of the Vestals and their duties till we come to the Vestalia in June.

FER[IAE] IOVI. MERCUR[IO] MAIAE. (VENUS^[426].)
MAIAE AD CIRC[UM] M[AXIMUM]. (CAER.) MERC[URIO]. (TUSC.)

The very curious rite which took place on this day is not mentioned in the calendars; it belonged to those which, like the Paganalia, were publica indeed and pro populo, but represented the people as divided in certain groups rather than the State as a whole^[427]. But its obvious antiquity, and the interesting questions which arise out of it, tempt me to treat it in detail, at the risk of becoming tedious.

I have already mentioned^[428] that there was a procession in March, as we infer from the sacra Argeorum quoted by Varro, which went round the sacella Argeorum, or twenty-four chapels situated in the four Servian regions of the city^[429]. What was done at these sacella we do not know; the procession and its doings had become so obscure in Ovid’s time that he could dispose of it in two lines of his Fasti, and express a doubt as to whether it took place on one day or two^[430]. Nor do we know what the sacella really were. The best conjecture is that of Jordan, who has brought some evidence together to show that they were small chapels or sacred places where holy things 112were deposited until the time came round for them to be used in some religious ceremony^[431].

But on May 15 there was another rite in which the word Argei plays a prominent part; and here the details have in part at least survived. The Argei in this case are not chapels, but a number of puppets or bundles of rushes, resembling (as Dionysius has recorded) men bound hand and foot, which were taken down to the pons sublicius by the Pontifices and magistrates, and cast into the river by the Vestal Virgins^[432]. The Flaminica Dialis, the priestess of Jupiter, was present at the ceremony in mourning. The number of the puppets was probably the same as that of the sacella of the same name^[433].

Explanations of these rites were invented by Roman scholars. The sacella were the graves of Greeks who had come to Italy with Hercules; and the puppets represented the followers of Hercules who had died on their journey and were to return home as it were by proxy^[434]. Apart from the theories of the learned, it was the fact that the common people at Rome believed the puppets to be substitutes for old men, who at one time used to be thrown into the Tiber as victims. Sexagenarios de ponte was a well-known proverb which in Cicero’s time was explained by supposing that the bridges alluded to were those over which the voters passed in the Comitia^[435]; but this view may at once be put aside. Those bridges were certainly a comparatively late invention, while the proverb was of remote antiquity.

But, given the details of the rite, and the popular belief about the old men as victims, what explanation can we hope to arrive at? We may freely admit that no satisfactory etymology of the word Argei is forthcoming; but this is perhaps, in 113a negative sense, an advantage to our inquiry^[436]. The Romans derived it from the Greek Ἀργεῖοι; and to this etymology Mommsen is now disposed to return. The writer of the article ‘Argei’ in the Mythological Lexicon derived it from varka-s = ‘wolf’; others have believed it to come from a root arg = ‘white’ or ‘shining,’ and though the termination eus is hardly a Latin one, it may be that this is the true basis of the word^[437].

Instead of prejudging the case by fanciful etymologies, or by attempting to decide the question whether the Romans ever practised the rites of human sacrifice, we will take the leading features of the ceremony, and see in what direction they may on the whole direct us. That done, it may be possible to sum up the debate, though a final and decisive verdict is not to be expected.

The features which demand attention are (1) the processional character of the rites; (2) the presence of the Pontifices and the Vestals; (3) the mourning of the Flaminica Dialis; (4) the rush-puppets and their immersion in the Tiber.

1. We can hardly doubt that there was a procession to the pons sublicius, though the fact is not expressly stated. We are tempted to believe that it visited each sacellum, and there found, or possibly made, the puppet (simulacrum), which thus represented the district of which the sacellum was the sacred centre; and that it then proceeded, bearing the puppets, probably by the Forum and Vicus Tuscus to the bridge^[438]. Now if this feature can help us at all—if we accept the connexion of the March and May ceremonies and their processional character—it must point in the direction of the purification of land or city, on the analogy of other Italian ceremonies of the same kind. 114At the end of this month took place the Ambarvalia, when the priests went round the land with prayer and sacrifice to ensure the good growth of the crops; and we have a remarkable instance of the same kind of practice in the celebrated inscription of Iguvium. Not only each city, but each pagus, and even each farmer, duly purified his land in some such way, cleansing it from the powers of evil and sterility, while at the same time the boundaries were renewed in the memories of all concerned. Bearing this in mind, and also the season of the year, we may fairly guess that the Argean processions had some relation to agriculture, and to the welfare of the precarious stock of wealth of an agricultural community.

2. The presence of the Pontifices and Vestals.—The former would be present, partly as the representative sacred college of the united city^[439], partly as having under their special care the sacred bridge from which the puppets were thrown. Whether or not the word pontifex be directly derived from pons^[440], it is certain that the ancient bridge, with its strong religious associations, was under their care, and that the river was an object of their constant liturgical attention^[441]. It has been suggested that the whole ceremony was one of bridge-worship^[442]; but this view, as we shall see, will hardly explain all the facts. It leaves the March rites unexplained, and also the presence of the Vestals; nor does it seem to suit the season of the year.

The presence of the Vestals is more significant; and it was they, as it seems, who performed the act of throwing the puppets from the bridge^[443]. In all the public duties performed by them (as we shall see more fully in dealing with the Vestalia^[444]) a reference can be traced to one leading idea, viz. that the food and nourishment of the State, of which the sacred fire was the symbol, depended for its maintenance on 115the accurate performance of these duties. We have just seen that they spent the seven days preceding the Ides of May in preparing their sacred cakes from the first ripening ears of corn. We shall see them using these cakes in June, September, and at the Lupercalia. At the Parilia and the Fordicidia they also take a prominent part, both of them festivals relating to the fruitfulness of herds and flocks; so also at the harvest festivals in August of Ops Consiva and Consus. And we can hardly suppose that their presence at the rite under discussion should have a different significance from that of their public service on all other occasions. Even if we had no other evidence to go upon, we might on the facts just adduced base a fair inference that this ceremony too had some relation to the processes and perils awaiting the ripening crops.

3. The Flaminica Dialis had on this day to lay aside her usual bridal dress, and to appear in mourning^[445]. The same rule was laid down for her during the ‘moving’ of the ancilia in March, and during the Vestalia up to the completion of the purification of the temple of Vesta. It is not easy to see what the meaning of this rule may have been. On the other two occasions there is nothing to lead us to suppose that it was some such terrible rite as human sacrifice which caused the change of costume; we need not therefore suppose that it was so on May 15. But if all three occasions are times of purification and the averting of evil influences: if they each mark the conclusion of an old season, and the necessity of great care in entering on a new one, we can better understand it. This was the case, as we saw, when in March the Salii were pervading the city, and it was so also at the Vestalia, which was preparatory to the ingathering of the crops. Some such critical moment, I think, the day we are discussing must also have been. Some light may be thrown on this aspect of the question by practices which have been collected by Dr. Mannhardt from Northern Europe^[446], some of which still 116survive. I will give a single instance from Russia. At Murom on June 29 a figure of straw, dressed in female clothing, is laid on a bier and carried to the edge of a lake or river; it is eventually torn up and thrown into the river, while the spectators hide their faces and behave as though they bewailed the death of Kostroma. In another district on the same day an old man carried out of the town a puppet representing the spring, and was followed by the women singing mournful songs and expressing by their gestures grief and despair.

4. The Puppets and their immersion in the Tiber.—There are two possible explanations of this curious practice.

(1) The puppets were substitutes for human victims, and probably for old men. The evidence for this view is—first, the Roman tradition expressed in the saying sexagenarios de ponte^[447], and supported by the fact that the puppets appeared, to Dionysius at least, like men bound hand and foot^[448]; secondly, the fact that human sacrifice was not entirely unknown at Rome, though there is no trace of any such custom regularly recurring. We may allow that Italy could not have been entirely free from a practice which existed even in Greece, and also that the habit of substituting some object for the original victim is common and well attested in religious history; but whether either the Argei, or the oscilla or maniae, which are often compared with the Argei, really had this origin, may well indeed be doubted^[449]. Thirdly, there is evidence that not only human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of old men, was by no means unknown in primitive times. Passing over the general evidence as to human sacrifice, we know that the old and weak 117were sometimes put to death^[450]. Being of no further use in the struggle for existence, they were got rid of in various ways—an act perhaps not so much of cruelty as of kindness, and under certain circumstances not incompatible with filial piety^[451]. The chief objections to this explanation are—first, that it obliges us to ascribe to the early Romans a habit which seems quite incompatible with their well-known respect for old age and their horror of parricide; secondly, that it does not explain why a practice, which can hardly have ever been a regularly recurring one, should have passed into a yearly ceremony^[452].

(2) The rite was of a dramatic rather than a sacrificial character^[453], and belongs to a class of which we have numerous examples both from Greek, Teutonic, and Slavonic peoples. In Greece, or rather in Egypt, we have the cult of Adonis, in which a puppet is immersed in the water amid wailings and lamentations. In Greece proper semi-dramatic rites are found at Chaeronea and Athens^[454], though somewhat different in character to those of the Argei and Adonis. Tacitus describes the immersion in water of the image of the German goddess Nerthus^[455]. But most significant are the many examples, of which Mannhardt formed an ample collection, in which puppets are found, made as a rule of straw, carried along in procession and thrown into a river or water of some kind, often from a bridge^[456]. Sometimes the place of these puppets is taken by a sheaf, a small tree, or a man or boy dressed up in foliage or 118fastened in the sheaf^[457]: but in almost all cases the object is ducked in water or at least sprinkled with it, though now and then it is burnt or buried. The best known example is that of the Bavarian ‘Wasservogel,’ which is either a boy or a puppet, as the custom may be in different places; he or it was decorated, carried round the fields at Whitsuntide^[458], and thrown from the bridge into the stream. So constant and inconvenient was this kind of custom in the Middle Ages that a law of 1351, still extant, forbade the ducking of people at Erfurt in the water at Easter and Whitsuntide^[459]. In many of these cases the simulacrum may have been substituted for a human being^[460]; but I find none where the notion of sacrifice survived, or where there was any trace of a popular belief that the object was a substitute for an actual victim. What these curious customs, according to Dr. Mannhardt, do really represent, is the departure of winter and the arrival of the fruitful season, or possibly the exhaustion of the vernal Power of vegetation after its work is done^[461].

Two features in these old customs may strike us as interesting in connexion with the Argei—(1) The fact that the central object is often either actually an old man, or is at least called ‘the old one.’ A Whitsuntide custom at Halle shows us, for example, a straw puppet called Der alte^[462]. (2) The constant occurrence of white objects in these customs; the puppet is called ‘the white man with the white hair, the snow-white husband,’ or is dressed in a white shirt^[463]. In these expressions it is perhaps not impossible that we may find a clue to the long-lost meaning of the word Argei. Can it be that the Roman puppets were originally called ‘the white ones,’ i. e. old ones, from a root 119arg = ‘white’^[464]; and that from a natural mistake as to the meaning of the word there arose not only the story about the Greek victims but also the common belief about sexagenarii being thrown over the bridge?

We have to choose between the two explanations given above. I am, on the whole, disposed to agree with Dr. Mannhardt, and in the absence of convincing evidence as to the regular and periodical occurrence of human sacrifice in ancient Italy, to regard these strange survivals as semi-dramatic performances rather than sacrificial rites. This view, however, need not exclude the possibility of the union of both drama and sacrifice at a very remote period, probably before the Latins settled in the district.

The immersion in water, whether or no it involved the death of a victim, is reasonably explained, on the basis of comparative evidence, to have been a rain-spell^[465]. In the cases already mentioned of Adonis, Nerthus, &c., this idea seems the prominent one. I am inclined to think, however, that the notion of purification was also present—the two uniting in the idea of regeneration. Plutarch calls the Argean rite ‘the greatest of the purifications,’ and he is here most probably reproducing the opinion of Varro^[466]. This is indicated by the presence of the priests and the Vestals, by the processions, and by the mourning of the Flaminica Dialis, as we have already seen. We may regard the rite as in fact a casting out of old things, and in that sense a purification; and also at the same time as a spell or earnest of rain and fertility in the ensuing year. The puppets 120were perhaps hung in the sacella in the course of the procession in March, as a symbol of the fertility then beginning, and cast into the river as ‘the old ones’ when that fertility had reached its height^[467].

In the last place, it might be asked in honour of what deity the rite was performed. It is hardly necessary, and certainly is not possible, to answer a question about which the Romans themselves were not agreed. Ovid and Dionysius^[468] believed it was Saturnus, probably following an old Greek oracle which was known to Varro^[469]. Verrius Flaccus thought it was Dis Pater^[470]. Modern writers have concluded on the general evidence of the rite that it was the river-god Tiberinus; Jordan, however, regarded the question as irrelevant^[471]. We may agree with him, and at least return a verdict of non liquet. If it was a sacrificial act, the ancient river-god is indeed likely enough; if it was a quasi-dramatic one, it does not follow that any deity was specially concerned in it. But we may go so far as to guess that it was connected with the worship of those vaguely-conceived deities of vegetation whose influence on the calendar we have been tracing since March 1.

This same day is marked in one calendar as Feriae Iovi, Mercurio, Maiae. The conjunction of these deities is to some extent accidental. In the first place the Ides of every month were sacred to Jupiter; and the addition of Mercurius is probably to be explained simply by the adaptation of a Greek myth which made Hermes the son of Jupiter, suggesting the selection of the Ides as an appropriate day for the cult of the Latin representative of Hermes^[472]. Mercurius, again, was associated with Maia, perhaps simply because the dedication-day of his oldest temple in Rome (ad circum maximum) was the Ides 121of the Mensis Maius^[473]. The Roman Mercurius was considered especially as the god of trade, and dated, like Ceres, from the time when an extensive corn trade first began in Rome^[474]. It is highly probable that the Tarquinian dynasty had encouraged Roman trade, and that the increase of population which was the result, together with the wars which followed their expulsion, had occasioned a series of severe famines. To this we trace the Roman knowledge of the Greek or Graeco-Etruscan Hermes, through a trade in corn with Sicilian Greeks or Etruscans, and the appearance of the god at Rome as Mercurius, the god of trade. His first temple was dedicated in B.C. 495, and as in other cases, the dedication was celebrated each year by those specially interested in the worship, in this case the mercatores, who were already, at this early period, formed into an organized guild^[475].

AGON[IA]^[476]. (ESQ. CAER. VEN. MAFF.)

VEDIOVI. (VEN.)

The other days sacred to Vediovis were January 1 and the Nones of March, from which latter day we postponed the consideration of this mysterious deity, in hopes of future enlightenment. But Vediovis is wrapped still, and always will be, in at least as profound an obscurity for us as he was for Varro and Ovid.

We have but his name to go upon, and two or three indistinct traces of his cult. The name seems certainly to be Vediovis, i. e. apparently ‘the opposite of,’ or ‘separated from,’ Jupiter (= Diovis); or, as Preller has it^[477], comparing, like Ovid, vegrandia farra (‘corn that has grown badly’), vescus, &c., Jupiter in a sinister sense. But this last explanation must, on the whole, be rejected. It is true that each deity has a sinister or threatening 122aspect as well as a smiling one; but in no other case was this separately personified, and the name, if its origin be rightly given as above (which is not indeed certain), might be explained by the well-known Roman habit of calling deities by their qualities and their business rather than by substantival names. In this case the name would be negatively deduced from that of one of the few gods who really had a name.

What we know of the cult is only this. First, it was peculiar, so far as we know, to Rome and Bovillae^[478]; secondly, the temples in Rome were in the space between the arx and Capitolium, ‘inter duos lucos’^[479], and another in the Tiber island^[480]—two places outside the Servian wall, and of importance for the security of the city; thirdly, the god was represented as young, holding arrows, and having a goat standing beside him, on account of which characteristics he was usually, according to Gellius, identified with Apollo^[481]; fourthly, the usual victim was a goat which was sacrificed humano ritu^[482].

On such faint traces it will be obvious that no sound conclusion can be based. The connexion with Bovillae and the gens Julia points to a genuine Latin origin. The sites on the Capitol and the island do not lead to any definite conclusion; in the former the god seems to have been connected with the so-called Asylum, in the latter with Aesculapius; but both these connexions may be accidental or later developments. Preller conjectured cleverly that Vediovis was a god of criminals who might take refuge in Rome and there find purification; but the idea of an Asylum, on which this is based, is Greek, and of much later date than any age which could have given a definite meaning to such a deity. We must here, as occasionally elsewhere, give up the attempt to discover the original nature of this god.

TUBIL[USTRIUM]. (ESQ. CAER. VEN. MAFF.)

FER[IAE] VOLCANO. (VEN. AMIT.)

I have already explained^[483] the view taken by Mommsen of the two pairs of days, March 23 and 24 and May 23 and 24, accepting his theory that the 24th in each month was the day on which wills could be made and witnessed in the Comitia calata, and that the 23rd in each month was the day on which the tubae were lustrated by which the assembly was summoned.

But May 23 is also marked in two calendars as feriae Volcano; and Ovid has noticed this in a single couplet:^[484]

The difficult question of the original character of Volcanus must be postponed until we come to his festival in August. We only need here to ask whether Ovid was right in regarding Volcanus as the smith who made the trumpets. This has been strenuously denied by Wissowa^[485], who goes so far as to believe that the deity originally invoked on this day was not Volcanus but Mars—since the corresponding day in March was a festival of that deity—and that Volcanus was at an early period thrust into his place under the influence of Greek notions of Hephaestus as a smith who made armour and also trumpets. Wissowa has, however, to throw over the two calendars quoted above (Ven. Amit.) in order to support his argument—and so far we are hardly entitled to go.

It is safer to take Volcanus as an ancient Roman deity whose cult was closely connected with that of Maia, or the Bona Dea, and was prominent in this month as well as in August. The Flamen Volcanalis sacrificed to the Bona Dea on May 1; and Maia was addressed in invocations as Maia Volcani^[486]. The coincidence of this festival of his with the Tubilustrium I take to have been accidental; but it led naturally, as the Romans 124became acquainted with Greek mythology, to the erroneous view represented by Ovid that Volcanus was himself a smith^[487].

FORTUNAE P[UBLICAE] P[OPULI] R[OMANI] Q[UIRITIUM] IN COLLE QUIRIN[ALI]. (CAER.)

FORTUNÆ PUBLICÆ P[OPULI] R[OMANI] IN COLL[E]. (ESQ.)

FORTUNÆ PRIM[IGENIAE] IN COL[LE]. (VEN.)

This was the dedication-day of one of three temples of Fortuna on the Quirinal; the place was known as ‘tres Fortunae^[488].’ The goddess in this case was Fortuna Primigenia, imported from Praeneste—of whom something will be said later on^[489]. The temple was vowed after the Second Punic War in B.C. 204, and dedicated ten years later^[490]. Our consideration of Fortuna may be postponed till the festival of Fors Fortuna, an older Roman form of the cult, on June 24.

The Ambarvalia, originally a religious procession round the land of the early Roman community, the object of which was to purify the crops from evil influences, does not appear in the Julian calendars, not being feriae stativae; but it is indicated in the later rustic calendars by the words, Segetes lustrantur. Its date may be taken as May 29^[491]: and this fixity will not appear incompatible with its character as a sacrum conceptivum, if we accept Mommsen’s explanation of the way in which some feasts might be fixed to a day according to the usage of the Italian farmer, but of varying date according to the civil calendar^[492].

There has been much discussion whether the Ambarvalia 125was identical with the similar festival of the Fratres Arvales. On the ground that the acta fratrum Arvalium seemed to prove a general similarity of the two in time and place, and at least in some points of ritual, Mommsen, Henzen, and Jordan answer in the affirmative^[493]. On the other side there is no authority of any real weight. The judicious Marquardt^[494] found a difficulty in the absence of any mention in the acta fratrum Arvalium of a lustratio in the form of a procession; but it should be remembered (1) that we have not the whole of the acta; (2) that it is almost certain that, as the Roman territory continued to increase, the brethren must have dropped the duty of driving victims round it, for obvious reasons. A passage in Paulus^[495] places the matter beyond doubt if we can be sure of the reading: ‘Ambarvales hostiae dicebantur quae pro arvis a duodecim (MSS. duobus) fratribus sacrificantur.’ As no duo fratres are known, the old emendation duodecim seems certain, but will of course not convince those who disbelieve in the identity of the Ambarvalia and the sacra fratrum Arvalium. The question is, however, for us of no great importance, as the acta do not add to our knowledge of what was done at the Ambarvalia.

The best description we have of such lustrations as the Ambarvalia is that of Virgil; it is not indeed to be taken as an exact description of the Roman rite, but rather as referring to Italian customs generally:

126It is not clear to what festival or festivals Virgil is alluding in the first few of these lines^[497]; probably to certain rustic rites which did not exactly correspond to those in the city of Rome. But from line 343 onwards the reference is certainly to Ambarvalia of some kind, perhaps to the private lustratio of the farmer before harvest began, of which the Roman festival was a magnified copy. His description answers closely to the well-known directions of Cato^[498]; and if it is Ceres who appears in Virgil’s lines, and not Mars, the deity most prominent in Cato’s account, this may be explained by the undoubted extension of the worship of Ceres, and the corresponding contraction of that of Mars, as the latter became more and more converted into a god of war^[499].

The leading feature in the original rite was the procession of victims—bull, sheep, and pig—all round the fields, driven by a garlanded crowd, carrying olive branches and chanting. These victims represent all the farmer’s most valuable stock, thus devoted to the appeasing of the god. The time was that when the crops were ripening, and were in greatest peril from storms and diseases; before the harvest was begun, and before the Vestalia took place in the early part of June, which was, as we shall see, a festival preliminary to harvest. Three times the procession went round the land; at the end of the third round the victims were sacrificed, and a solemn prayer was offered in antique language, which ran, in Cato’s formula of the farmer’s lustration, as follows: ‘Father Mars, I pray and beseech thee to be willing and propitious to me, my household, and my slaves; for the which object I have caused this threefold sacrifice to be driven round my farm and land. I pray thee keep, avert, and turn from us all disease, seen or unseen, all desolation, ruin, damage, and unseasonable influence; I pray thee give increase to the fruits, the corn, the vines, and the 127plantations, and bring them to a prosperous issue. Keep also in safety the shepherds and their flocks, and give good health and vigour to me, my house, and household. To this end it is, as I have said—namely, for the purification and making due lustration of my farm, my land cultivated and uncultivated—that I pray thee to bless this threefold sacrifice of sucklings. O Father Mars, to this same end I pray thee bless this threefold sacrifice of sucklings^[500].’

Not only in this prayer, but in the ritual that follows, as also in other religious directions given in the preceding chapters, we may no doubt see examples of the oldest agricultural type of the genuine Italian worship. They are simple rustic specimens of the same type as the elaborate urban ritual of Iguvium, fortunately preserved to us^[501]; and we may fairly assume that they stood in much the same relation to the Roman ritual of the Ambarvalia.

Of all the Roman festivals this is the only one which can be said with any truth to be still surviving. When the Italian priest leads his flock round the fields with the ritual of the Litania major in Rogation week he is doing very much what the Fratres Arvales did in the infancy of Rome, and with the same object. In other countries, England among them, the same custom was taken up by the Church, which rightly appreciated its utility, both spiritual and material; the bounds of the parish were fixed in the memory of the young, and the wrath of God was averted by an act of duty from man, cattle, and crops. ‘It was a general custom formerly, and is still observed in some country parishes, to go round the bounds and limits of the parish on one of the three days before Ascension-day; when the Minister, accompanied by his Churchwardens and Parishioners, was wont to deprecate the vengeance of God, beg a blessing on the fruits of the earth, and preserve the rights and properties of the parish^[502].’