Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/196

176 the creative goddess (Dea Dia) in May to bless the growth of the seed, and who, along with the two colleges of Salii, were regarded as the chief of the priestly colleges of Rome. These were accompanied by the Titian brotherhood, which had to preserve and to attend to the distinctive cultus of that Roman tribe (P. 46), and by the thirty "curial kindlers" (flamines curiales), instituted for the hearths of the thirty curies. There were several religious observances of less repute given in charge to certain gentes, but in which the people also took part. Such was the "wolf-festival" (Lupercalia) which was celebrated for the protection of the flocks and herds in honour of the "favourable god" (Faunus), by the Quinctian gens and the Fabii who were associated with them after the admission of the Hill-Romans, in the month of February—a genuine shepherds' carnival, in which the "wolf-repellers" (Luperci) jumped about naked with a girdle of goatskin, and whipped the people with thongs. In like manner the service of Hercules devolved on the Potitii and Pinarii, and the community was doubtless conceived as represented and participating in the case of numerous other gentile rites.

To this earliest worship of the Roman community new rites were gradually added. The most important of these worships had reference to the city as newly united and founded as it were anew by the construction of the great wall and stronghold. In it the Iovis of the Capitol highest and best, that is, the genius of the Roman people, was placed at the head of all the Roman divinities, and his "kindler" thenceforth appointed, the Flamen Dialis, formed in conjunction with the two priests of Mars the sacred triad of high-priests. Contemporaneously began the cultus of the new single city-hearth—Vesta—and the kindred cultus of the Penates of the community (P. 117). Six chaste virgins, daughters as it were of the household of the Roman people, attended to that pious service, and had to maintain the wholesome fire of the common hearth always blazing as an example (P. 37) and a sign to the burgesses. This worship, half-domestic, half-public, was the most sacred of all in Rome, and it accordingly was the latest of all the heathen worships there to give way before the ban of Christianity. The Aventine, moreover, was assigned to Diana as the representative of the Latin confederacy (P. 111), but for that very reason no special Roman priesthood was appointed for her; and the commu-