s name to the festival and was the cause
of the subsequent evolution of an eponymous deity, Meditrina, but there
is little doubt that in origin here, as in the other wine-festivals,
the deity concerned was at first Iuppiter. Among the other rustic
ceremonies of the month we may notice the festival of springs
(_Fontinalia_) on October 13: wells were decorated with garlands and
flowers flung into the waters.

=3. Festivals of the Winter.=--The winter-festivals cannot be summed up
under one general notion so easily as those of spring or summer, but
they fall fairly naturally into two groups--the festivals immediately
connected with agricultural life and those associated with the dead and
the underworld or with solemn purification. The main action of the
farmer's life during the winter is, of course, the sowing of the next
year's crop, which was commemorated in the ancient festival of the
Saturnalia on December 17. Though the Saturnalia is perhaps the most
familiar to us of all the Roman festivals, partly from the allusions in
the classics, especially in Horace, partly because it is no doubt the
source of many of our own Christmas festivities, it is yet almost
impossible now to recover anything of its original Roman character.
Greek influence set to work on it very early, identifying Saturnus with
Cronos and establishing him in a Greek temple with all the
accompaniments of Greek ritual. All the familiar features of the
festival--the freedom and license of the slaves, the giving of
presents, even the wax-candles, which are the prototype of those on our
own Christmas-tree--are almost certainly due to Greek origin. We are
left with nothing but the name Saturnus (connected with the root of
_semen_, _serere_) and the date to assure us that we have here in
reality a genuine Roman festival of the sowing of the crops. Of a
similar nature--marking, as Ovid tells us, the completion of the
sowing--was the _feriae sementivae_ or Paganalia, associated with the
earth-goddesses, Ceres and Tellus. Meal-cakes and a pregnant sow were
the offerings, the beasts who had helped in the ploughing were
garlanded, and prayer was made for the seed resting in the ground. A
curious feature of the winter worship is the repetition of festivals to
the harvest deities, Consus and Ops, separated by the same interval of
three days, on December 15 and 19: it may be that we have here an
indication of the final completion of the harvest, or, as Mr. Warde
Fowle