adhering to the old sacred rules as to
the hours on which business could be transacted on such days.[459]
Secondly, certain festivals which retained their popularity had been
extended from one day to three or more, in one or two cases, as we
shall see, even to thirteen and fifteen days, in order to give
time for an elaborate system of public amusement consisting of
chariot-races and stage-plays, and known by the name of _ludi_, or, as
at the winter Saturnalia, to enable all classes to enjoy themselves
during the short days for seven mornings instead of one. Obviously
this was a much more convenient and popular arrangement than to have
your holidays scattered about over the whole year as single days; and
it suited the rich and ambitious, who sought to obtain popular favour
by shows and games on a grand scale, needing a succession of several
days for complete exhibition. So the old religious word feriae becomes
gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amusement,
by the word _ludi_, and came at last to mean, as it still does in
Germany, the holidays of schoolboys.[460] These ludi will form the
chief subject of this chapter; but we must first mention one or two
of the old feriae which seem always to have remained occasions of
holiday-making, at any rate for the lower classes of the population.

One of these occurred on the Ides of March, and must have been going
on at the moment when Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C. It was the
festival of Anna Perenna, a mysterious old deity of "the ring of the
year." The lower class of the population, Ovid tells us,[461] streamed
out to the "festum geniale" of Anna, and spent the whole day in the
Campus Martius, lying about in pairs of men and women, indulging
in drinking and all kinds of revelry. Some lay in the open; some
constructed tents, or rude huts of boughs, stretching their togas over
them for shelter. As they drank they prayed for as many years of life
as they could swallow cups of wine. The usual characteristics of the
Italian _festa_ were to be found there: they sang anything they had
picked up in the theatre, with much gesticulation ("et iactant faciles
ad sua verba manus"), and they danced, the women letting down their
long hair. The result of these performances was naturally that they
returned home in a state of intoxication, which roused the mirth of
the bystanders. Ovid adds that he had himself met them so returning,
and had seen an old woman pulling al