eric poems, which stands in such striking
contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.[208] When we do
read of any kind of grossness in worship or the accompanying
festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is _not_
among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in
March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and
drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups
of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a
chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was
sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the
blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the
object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the
Subura.[209] We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei,
if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;[210] on May 15, as
we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into
the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_, possibly with the object of
procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that _dies
religiosi_ were not marked in the Fasti, _i.e._ days on which some
uncomfortable feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the
_mundus_ was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode
below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the
calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law,
not of _superstitio_, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably
means what is outside that religious law, outside the _ius divinum_; and
it is a document of _religio_ only so far as it is meant to organise and
carry out the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, the natural results of that
feeling which the Romans called _religio_. It stands on exactly the same
footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail
with the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, and rigidly excluded all foreign and
barbarous rites and superstitions.

I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or
allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices
and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was
the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up
the calendar as the fundamental charter of the _ius divinum_ must have
had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to
the deities who