ent that the one who wrote on
the _Fasti_ lived as late as the age of Augustus. But putting that
aside, what are we to make of the fact that another annalist, L.
Calpurnius Piso (famous as the author of the first lex de repetundis,
149 B.C.), said that the wife of Volcanus was not Maia, but Maiestas?
Piso was not a good authority (see above, p. 51), but he seems here to
bring the "consort" of the fire-god into line with such expressions of
activity as Moles, Virites, and so on; and it seems that as early as the
second century B.C., sport and speculation with these names were
beginning. I have quoted the whole pedantic passage from Macrobius in my
_Roman Festivals_, p. 98, where the reader may enjoy it at leisure. I
shall not be surprised if he comes to the conclusion that neither
Macrobius nor his learned informers knew anything about Maia. When he
reads that she was the mother of Mercurius, he will recollect that
Mercurius was not a Roman deity of the earliest period, and did not
belong to the _di indigetes_; and when he finds that she is identified
with Bona Dea, he must not forget that that deity, as scholars are now
pretty well agreed, was introduced at Rome from Tarentum in the age of
the Punic Wars. The one fact we know is the sacrifice by the flamen
Volcanalis on May 1. Someone went to work to explain this and another,
viz. that the Ides of the month was the dedication day of the first
temple of Mercurius (B.C. 495), and also the fact that the temple of the
Bona Dea on the Aventine was dedicated on the Kalends. The result was an
extraordinary jumble of fancy and myth, which has been recognised as
such by those who have studied closely the methods of Graeco-Roman
scholarship. The unwary, of course, are taken in. A student of these
methods might do well to take as an exercise in criticism the three
"specimens of Roman mythology" which Dr. Frazer says (p. 413) have
"survived the wreck of antiquity"--the loves of Vertumnus and Pomona, of
Jupiter and Juturna, of Janus and Cardea. In the last of these
especially he will find one of the most audacious pieces of charming and
wilful invention that a Latin poet could perpetrate, in imitation of
Hellenistic love tales, and to suit the taste of a public whose
education was mainly Greek.

The above lengthy note was written before I had seen von Domaszewski's
paper on this subject ("Festschrift fuer O. Hirschfeld") reprinted in
_Abhandlungen zur roem. Religion_, p. 104 foll. c