rm. Like the descriptions of Ovid and Tibullus, it is
more valuable to us for the idea it gives us of the spirit of old
Italian agricultural religion than for exact knowledge about dates and
details. There was, of course, endless variety in Italy in both these;
and it is waste of time to try and make the descriptions of the rural
poets fit in with the fixed festivals of the Roman city calendar.

Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the
familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the
calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we
may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed
beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not
venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same
sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial
festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may
mention another _festa_ of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by
Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as
taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the
woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their
cattle in the summer;[169] by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less
tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding
to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,[170] who on the Nones of
December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding
peacefully on the winter pasture:--

ludit herboso pecus omne campo
cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres:
festus in _pratis_ vacat otioso
cum bove pagus.

There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say
a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One
of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding
household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as
against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from
unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations
of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety--a matter in which
the feeling of anxiety and awe (_religio_) brought with it, to use an
expression of Cicero's, both _cura_ and _caerimonia_.[171] The _religio
terminorum_ is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical
times, from the Roman writers on _agrimetatio_; and with their help the