Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/134

122 festivals of Italy, some of which find a curious parallel in old English customs growing daily more nearly obsolete. One very remarkable example is the Festival of the Ambarvalia, to which Tibullus devotes the first elegy of his second book, in a description which is, along with a well-known passage of the First Georgic of Virgil, a chief locus classicus touching this rural celebration. That which the poet describes must be regarded as the private festival held towards the end of April by the head of every family, and not the public and national feast performed by the Fratres Arvales in May. This festival, held in honour not of Ceres only, as it might seem from Virgil, but of Mars also, as we gather from Cato's treatise on Rustic matters, and, as we learn from Catullus, of Bacchus and the gods of the family, and even Cupid, took its name from the chief feature—of the victim offered on the occasion being thrice solemnly led round the fields before the first sheaf of corn was reaped, or the first bunch of grapes cut. In its train followed the reapers, vine-pruners, farm-servants, dancing and singing praise to Ceres or Bacchus, and making libations of honey, wine, and milk. The object was the purification and hallowing of themselves, their herds, their fields and fruits, by the rural population of Latium; and it was supposed to keep plague and pestilence from the border which the procession perambulated. As to the victim, an earlier admission of Tibullus in the course of his poems lets us into the fact that with him, owing to his circumstances, it was only a lamb, whereas richer worshippers offered either a calf, or sometimes a lamb,