ade offerings of _fruges_, the products
of the earth, as we do at our harvest festivals; these were the
firstfruits of the coming harvest.[939] It may be worth while to recall
the facts that it was on these same days that the procession of the
Ambarvalia used to go round the ripening crops, and that in the early
days of June the symbolic _penus_ of Vesta was being cleansed to receive
the new grain.[940] That Augustus wished to emphasise the importance of
Italian agriculture is beyond doubt, and is apparent also in the hymn of
Horace, _Fertilis frugum pecorisque Tellus spicea donet Cererem corona,
etc._

When the _suffimenta_ had been distributed and the offerings made, all
was ready for the putting away or burying of the old _saeculum_. On the
night before 1st June Augustus himself, together with Agrippa,
sacrificed to the Greek Moirae, the Parcae of Horace's hymn, perhaps in
some sense the Fata of the _Aeneid_; on the second night to Eilithyia,
the Greek deity of childbirth; and on the third to Mother Tellus. The
form of prayer accompanying the sacrifice is preserved in the
inscription; it is Latin in language and form, as dry and concise as any
we examined in my lectures on ritual, and contains the _macte esto_
which I was then at pains to explain. Augustus prayed for the safety and
prosperity of the State in every way, and also for himself, his house,
and his familia.[941] The scene on the bank of the Tiber, illuminated by
torches, must have been most impressive.

These were the nightly ceremonies. But each day also had its ritual, in
which the Roman deities of the heaven were the objects of worship, not,
as by the Tiber bank, Greek deities of the earth and the nether world.
On the first two days Augustus and Agrippa offered the proper victims to
Jupiter and Juno respectively on the Capitol; Minerva is omitted, and
probably the other two are reckoned in Greek fashion as a married pair.
The form of prayer was the same as that used by night, with the
necessary modifications. Thus the great Capitoline temple and its
deities have a full share of attention, and they go too far who think
that Augustus was so wanting in tact as to put them in the shade.[942]
But on the third and last day the scene changes from the Capitol to the
Palatine, the residence of Augustus, where he had built his great temple
of Apollo; here for the first time in the ceremony Horace's hymn was
sung. On all the days and nights there had been shows a