s of
his mind, and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan and
Faliscan workmen. At first she was worshipped merely by these workmen in
their own houses, but by degrees as the number of these workmen
increased and as a knowledge of their handicraft spread to native
Romans, Minerva became so prominent that the state was compelled to
acknowledge her, and to accept her among the gods of the state. But it
was a very different acknowledgment from that of Hercules or Castor;
these gods had been received inside the _pomerium_, but Minerva was
given a temple outside, over on the Aventine. None the less her cult
throve, and her power was soon shown both religiously and socially. Her
great festival was on the 19th of March, a day which had been originally
sacred to Mars, but the presence of Minerva's celebrations on that day
soon caused the associations with Mars to be almost entirely forgotten.
Socially her temple became the meeting-place of all the artisans of
Rome, it was at once their religious centre and their business
headquarters. There they met in their primitive guilds (_collegia_) and
arranged their affairs, and thus it continued to be as long as pagan
Rome lasted. The respect shown to these guilds of Minerva is nowhere
more clearly exhibited than in an incident which happened in the time of
the Second Punic War, several centuries after the introduction of the
cult. Terrified by adverse portents the Roman Senate instructed the old
poet Livius Andronicus to write a hymn in honour of Juno and to train a
chorus of youths and maidens to sing it. The hymn was sung, and was such
a great success that the gratitude of the Senate took the form of
granting permission to the poets of the city to have a guild of their
own, and a meeting-place along with the older guilds in the temple of
Minerva on the Aventine. This was the Roman state's first expression of
literary appreciation; from her standpoint it was flattery indeed, for
were not poets by this decree made equal to butchers, bakers, and
cloth-makers, and was not poetry acknowledged to be of some practical
use and adjudged a legitimate occupation?

The history of the cult of Minerva is much more complicated than that of
Hercules or Castor. Like them she was subjected to strong Greek
influence, and, as we shall see later, not very long after her
introduction she was taken into the company of Juppiter and Juno, thus
forming the famous Capitoline triad. Also temples were bui