ilius of
Tusculum, fought against the Romans in the battle of Lake Regillus on
July 15, B.C. 499. The Romans won, and the first news of victory was
brought to Rome by the miraculous appearance of Castor and Pollux who
were seen watering their horses in the Forum at the spring of Juturna. A
temple on this spot was then vowed and fifteen years later, B.C. 484, it
was completed and dedicated. Tusculum, July 15, and the dedication of
the temple in B.C. 484 are seemingly the only historical facts in this
legend; and long before B.C. 499 Castor was worshipped in Rome,
especially on July 15. The site of his original worship was without
doubt the same locality in the Forum where his temple was subsequently
built, for it is an almost invariable rule that the earliest temples are
built on the actual site of, or close to, the old altar or shrine which
preceded the formal temple. Like Hercules therefore he was received
inside the _pomerium_, and probably for a similar reason, because it was
felt that he was a god of Tusculum, and hence a god of Rome's kinsfolk.
We have an additional confirmation of this feeling in the way in which
the later direct cult of Castor was treated. This cult, connecting
Castor with healing and the interpretation of dreams, and emphasising
his function as a rescuer from the dangers of the sea, would have been
without meaning for the old Romans who worshipped him merely as a patron
of horsemen and horsemanship. The new ideas seem to have had as their
centre a later temple in the Circus Flaminius and thus Hercules and
Castor may again be paralleled, since they have, each of them, an old
cult-centre inside the _pomerium_, Hercules in the Forum Boarium, Castor
in the Forum, and a later cult-centre, for more advanced ideas, in each
case in the Circus Flaminius.

Although it was Greek influence which ultimately caused the destruction
of Roman religion, and although the cults of Hercules and of Castor are
the first definite effects of this influence, it cannot be said that the
destruction had in any sense begun, because in their slow journey
northward, and in their long residence at Tibur and Tusculum
respectively, the two cults had lost all that was pernicious. The Roman
instinct, which felt them to be akin to itself, did not go amiss; they
were indeed akin to the new Rome with its new interest in trade and its
increased interest in warfare, for the trader and the warrior have gone
side by side in all ages of th