ecause on one occasion
disaster had followed the offering of a sacrifice on the 16th of
Quinctilis. It is difficult to believe that thirty-six days in the year
were thus tabooed, by a Roman senate and Roman magistrates, in a period
when the practical wisdom of the government was beginning to be a marked
characteristic of the State. Some people, we are told, went so far as to
treat the _fourth day before_ Kalends, Nones, and Ides in the same way;
but Gellius declares that he could find no tradition about this except a
single passage of Claudius Quadrigarius, in which he said that the
fourth day before the Nones of Sextilis was that on which the battle of
Cannae was fought.[71]

I am strongly inclined to suggest that the traditional explanation of
the tabooing of these thirty-six, or possibly seventy-two days was
neither more nor less than an aetiological myth, like hundreds of others
which were invented to account for Roman practices, religious and other;
and this supposition seems to be confirmed as we go on with the list of
_dies religiosi_ as given by Wissowa. The three days--Sextilis 24,
October 5, November 8--on which the Manes were believed to come up from
the underworld through the _mundus_ (to which I shall return later on)
were _religiosi_;[72] so were those when the temple of Vesta remained
open (June 7 to 15),[73] those on which the Salii performed their
dances in March and October,[74] two days following the _feriae Latinae_
(a movable festival),[75] and the days of the Parentalia in February and
the Lemuria in May, which were concerned with the cult and the memory of
the dead.[76] Now the _religio_ or taboo on these days obviously springs
either from a feeling of anxiety suggested by very primitive notions of
the dead and of departed spirits; or in the case of the temple of Vesta,
by some mystical purification or disinfection preparatory to the
ingathering of the crops, which I noticed in my _Roman Festivals_ (p.
152 foll.); or again in the case of the Salii, by some danger to the
crops from evil spirits, etc., which might be averted by their peculiar
performances. In fact, all these _dies religiosi_ date as such, we may
be pretty sure, from a very primitive period before the genesis of the
City-state, and were not recognised--for what reason we will not at
present attempt to guess--as _religiosi_ by the authorities who drew up
the Calendar. Some of them appear in that calendar as _dies nefasti_,
but not all