f course much of their native
simplicity and naivete; some of them survived merely as religious or
priestly performances, some became degraded into licentious enjoyment;
but the music and dancing, the gay dresses, the racing, the mumming
or acting, are all to be found in the city, developed in one form or
another, from the earliest to the latest periods of Roman history.

The Latin word for a holiday was _feriae_, a term which belongs to the
language of religious law (_ius divinum_). Strictly speaking, it means
a day which the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to the
service of the gods.[455] As of old on the farm no work was to be done
on such days, so in the city no public business could be transacted.
Cicero, drawing up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum,
writes thus of feriae: "Feriis iurgia amovento, easque in familiis,
operibus patratis, habento": which he afterwards explains as meaning
that the citizen must abstain from litigation, and the slave be
excused from labour.[456] The idea then of a holiday was much the same
as we find expressed in the Jewish Sabbath, and had its root also in
religious observance. But Cicero, whether he is actually reproducing
the words of an old law or inventing it for himself, was certainly
not reflecting the custom of the city in his own day; no such rigid
observance of a rule was possible in the capital of an Empire such
as the Roman had become. Even on the farm it had long ago been found
necessary to make exceptions; thus Virgil tells us:[457]

"Quippe etiam festis quaedam exercere diebus
Fas et iura sinunt: rivos deducere nulla
Religio vetuit, segeti praetendere saepem,
Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres,
Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri."

So too in the city it was simply impossible that all work should
cease on feriae, of which there were more than a hundred in the year,
including the Ides of every month and some of the Kalends and Nones.
As a matter of fact a double change had come about since the city and
its dominion began to increase rapidly about the time of the Punic
wars. First, many of the old festivals, sacred to deities whose
vogue was on the wane, or who had no longer any meaning for a city
population, as being deities of husbandry, were almost entirely
neglected: even if the priests performed the prescribed rites, no one
knew and no one cared,[458] and it may be doubted whether the State
was at all scrupulous in