Footnotes have been collected at the end of the text, and arelinked for ease of reference.
The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic
PREFACE
A word of explanation seems needed about the formthis book has taken. Many years ago I became speciallyinterested in the old Roman religion, chiefly, I think,through studying Plutarch’s Quaestiones Romanae, at atime when bad eyesight was compelling me to abandona project for an elaborate study of all Plutarch’s works.The ‘scrappy’ character not only of the Quaestiones, butof all the material for the study of Roman ritual, suitedweak eyes better than the continual reading of Greektext; but I soon found it necessary to discover a threadon which to hang these fragments in some regular order.This I naturally found in the Fasti as edited byMommsen in the first volume of the Corpus InscriptionumLatinarum; and it gradually dawned on me that theonly scientific way of treating the subject was to followthe calendar throughout the year, and to deal with eachfestival separately. I had advanced some way in thiswork, when Roscher’s Lexicon of Greek and RomanMythology began to appear in parts, and at once convincedme that I should have to do my work all overagain in the increased light afforded by the indefatigableindustry of the writers of the Roman articles. I thereforedropped my work for several years while theLexicon was in progress, and should have waited stilllonger for its completion, had not Messrs. Macmillanviiiinvited me to contribute a volume on the Romanreligion to their series of Handbooks of Archaeology andAntiquities.
Having once set out on the plan of following theFasti, I could not well abandon it, and I still hold itto be the only sound one: especially if, as in thisvolume, the object is to exhibit the religious side ofthe native Roman character, without getting entangledto any serious extent in the colluvies religionum ofthe last age of the Republic and the earlier Empire.The book has thus