r has suggested, a ceremonial opening of the storehouses, to see
that the harvest is not rotting. Among the other country festivals of
the period we may notice that of Carmenta, on the 11th and 15th of
January: she seems to have been in origin a water-_numen_, but was
early associated with childbirth: hence the rigid exclusion of men from
her ceremonies and possibly the taboo on leathern thongs, on the ground
that nothing involving death must be used in the worship of a deity of
birth. The repetition of her festival may possibly point to separate
celebrations of the communities of Palatine and Quirinal. At this time,
too, occurred the rustic ceremonies at the boundaries (_Terminalia_)
and the offering to the Lares at the 'marches' (_Compitalia_), of which
we have spoken in treating of the worship of the house.
The other group of winter-festivals is of a much more gloomy and less
definitely rustic type, though they clearly date from the period of the
agricultural community. Of the Feralia of February 21, the culmination
of the festival of the kindred dead (_Parentalia_), we have already
spoken. The Larentalia is a very mysterious occasion, and was supposed
by the Romans themselves to be an offering 'at the tomb' of a legendary
Acca Larentia, mistress of Hercules. But we have seen reason to think
that Larentia was in reality a deity of the dead, and the 'tomb' a
_mundus_: if so, we have another link between the winter season and the
worship of the underworld. There remains the weird festival of the
Lupercalia on February 15, to which we have had occasion to refer
several times, and which has become more familiar to most of us than
other Roman festivals owing to its political use by Mark Antony in 44
B.C. As we have argued already, it seems to belong to the very oldest
stratum of the Palatine settlement, and we may therefore appropriately
close this account of the early festivals with a somewhat fuller
description of it. The worshippers assembled at the Lupercal, a cave on
the Palatine hill: there goats and a dog were sacrificed, and two
youths belonging to the two colleges of Fabian and Quintian (or
Quintilian) Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the knife used for
the sacrifice and wiped with wool dipped in milk--at which point it was
ordained that they should laugh. Then they girt on the skins of the
slain goats and, after feasting, ran their course round the boundaries
of the Palatine hill, followed each by his ow
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