lia, the offering would be the simpler gift of millet-cakes and
bowls of milk: in the case of the Bona Dea we have the curious
provision that if wine were used in the ceremonial, it must, as she was
in origin a pastoral deity, always be spoken of as 'milk.' The persons
who might be present in the various festivals were also rigidly
determined: men were excluded from the Matronalia on March 1, from the
Vestalia on the 9th of June, and from the night festival of the Bona
Dea: the notorious escapade of Clodius in 62 B.C. shows the scandal
raised by a breach of this rule even at the period when religious
enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb. Slaves were specifically admitted to
a share in certain festivals such as the Saturnalia and the Compitalia
(the festival of the Lares), whereas at the Matralia (the festival of
the matrons) a female slave was brought in with the express purpose of
being significantly driven away.

The general notion of the exactness of ritual will perhaps become
clearer when we come to examine some of the festivals in detail, but it
is of extreme importance for the understanding of the Roman religious
attitude, to think of it from the first as an essential part in the
expression of the relation of man to god.

=4. Directness of Relation--Functions of Priests.=--In contrast to all
this precision of ritual, which tends almost to alienate humanity from
deity, we may turn to another hardly less prominent feature of the
Roman religion--the immediateness of relation between the god and his
worshippers. Not only may the individual at any time approach the altar
of the god with his prayer or thank-offering, but in every community of
persons its religious representative is its natural head. In the
family the head of the household (_pater familias_) is also the priest
and he is responsible for conducting the religious worship of the whole
house, free and slave alike: to his wife and daughters he leaves the
ceremonial connected with the hearth (_Vesta_) and the deities of the
store-cupboard (_Penates_), and to his bailiff the sacrifice to the
powers who protect his fields (_Lares_), but the other acts of worship
at home and in the fields he conducts himself, and his sons act as his
acolytes. Once a year he meets with his neighbours at the boundaries of
their properties and celebrates the common worship over the
boundary-stones. So in[4] the larger outgrowth of the family, the
_gens_, which consisted of all persons w