Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/169

 THE ROMAN GODS 155 versary of its establishment was celebrated on the first of May. Her chief festival, however, was kept with secret sacrifices by the vestal virgins and the noble women of Eome, all men being excluded, at the beginning of December, in the house of a praetor or a consul, who in this function probably had taken the place earlier allotted to the king. In works of art she appears as a woman in a sitting posture, fully clothed ; like her hus- band Faunus, she carries in her arms a cornucopia. Besides Libera and Pomona, who have already been mentioned, Feronia, Flora, Pales, and perhaps Diana, were closely related to the Bona Dea. Feronia was a goddess of central Italy, whose worship was carried on chiefly in a grove near Capena, not far from Mount Soracte in Etruria, and in a similar one near Tarracina, in the vicinity of the Pontine marshes. At Eome a festival in her honor was kept about the middle of November in the Campus Martins. She was always invoked as a giver of the blessings of the harvest ; and, inasmuch as at all harvest festivals the slaves enjoyed many liberties, the emancipation of slaves was frequently accomplished in the temple of this goddess. 202. Flora, who likewise was indigenous to central Italy, was in the narrower sense a goddess of flowers, and then, by a natural development of the thought, a dispenser of fruitfulness. At Eome she had a very ancient temple on the Quirinal hill. On the 28th of April the flower festival (Flordlia) was celebrated with wanton dances and coarse jests ; after a while scenic games and games of the circus were added to the festivities. With her was associated Eobigus, the god that protected the grain from the robigo (' rust ').