n in
the private _lustratio_ of the farm, which Cato has preserved for
us.[269] In each case the victims are the same, the _suovetaurilia_ of
ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer's most valuable property. Again, let us
remember that the month which bears his name is that not only of the
opening of the war season, but of the springing up of vegetation, and
that the dances and singing of the Salii at this time may probably have
been meant, like similar performances of savage peoples,[270] to
frighten away evil demons from the precious cultivated land and its
growing produce, and to call on the Power to wake to new life. The clue
to the mystery is perhaps to be found in the cult-title Silvanus which
we find in the prayer set down by Cato as proper for the protection of
the cattle when they are on their summer pasture (_in silva_): "Marti
Silvano in silva interdius in capita singula boum facito."[271] We know
that wealth in early Italy consisted chiefly of sheep and cattle; we
know that these were taken in the warm months, as they still are, into
the forest (_saltus_) to feed;[272] and from this passage of Cato we
know that Mars was there. It is only going one step farther if we
conjecture that Mars, like Silvanus, who may have been an offshoot of
his own being, was for the early settler never a peaceful inhabitant of
the farm or the dwelling, but a spirit of the woodland of great
importance for the cattle-owner, and of great importance, too, in all
circumambulation of the boundaries which divided the woodland from the
cultivated land.[273]

But with conjecture I deal on principle but sparingly. It is time to
turn to the Mars of the City-state of Rome; and it is at once
interesting to find that until the age of Augustus, who introduced a new
form of Mars-worship, he had no temple within the walls, and even
outside only two _fana_, one an altar in his own field the Campus
Martius, the other a temple dedicated in 388 B.C. outside the Porta
Capena. "He was always worshipped outside the city," says Dr. J. B.
Carter in his _Religion of Numa_, "as a god who must be kept at a
distance." Should we not rather say that the god was unwilling to come
within those sacred boundaries encircling the works of man? So stated,
we may see in this singular fact a reminiscence of the time when Mars
was really the wild spirit of the "outland," where wolves and human
enemies might be met with; he was perhaps in some sense a _hostis_, a
stranger, like t