herds; those of Summer, the festivals of fulfilment, including the
celebration of harvest; and those of Winter, the festivals of sowing,
of social rejoicing, and in the later months of purificatory
anticipation of the coming year.

=1. Festivals of Spring.=--The old Roman year--as may be seen clearly
enough from the names of the months still known by numbers, September,
October, etc.--began in March: according to tradition Romulus reckoned
a year of ten months altogether, and Numa added January and February.
The Spring months properly speaking may be reckoned as March, April,
and May. In March there were in the developed Calendar no festivals of
an immediately recognisable agricultural character, but the whole month
was practically consecrated to its eponymous deity, Mars. Now, to the
Roman of the Republic, Mars was undoubtedly the deity associated with
war, and his special festivals in this month are of a warlike
character: on the 9th the priests (_Salii_) began the ancient custom of
carrying his sacred shields (_ancilia_) round the town from one
ordained resting-place to another: on the 19th, Quinquatrus, the
shields were solemnly purified, and on the 23rd the same ceremony was
performed with the war-trumpets: the Equirria (horse-races) of March
14 may have had an agricultural origin--we shall meet with races later
on as a feature of rustic festivals--but they were certainly celebrated
in a military manner. Yet there is good reason for believing that Mars
was in origin associated not with war, but with the growth of
vegetation: he was, as we shall see, the chief deity addressed in the
solemn lustration of the fields (_Ambarvalia_), and if our general
notion of the development of religion with the growing needs of the
agricultural community crystallising into a state be correct, it may
well be that a deity originally concerned with the interests of the
farmer took on himself the protection of the soldier, when the fully
developed state came into collision with its neighbours. If so, we may
well have in these recurring festivals of Mars the sense, as Mr. Warde
Fowler has put it, of 'some great _numen_ at work, quickening
vegetation, and calling into life the powers of reproduction in man and
the animals.' Possibly another agricultural note is struck in the
Liberalia of the 17th: though the cult of Liber was almost entirely
overlaid by his subsequent identification with Dionysus, it seems right
to recognise in him and