whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume
of the _Gromatici_.[172] We know that many different objects might serve
as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees
and stones; and in the case of the latter, which would be the usual
_termini_ in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the
religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively
brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a
victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands
converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and
carefully fixed."[173] This had the practical effect--for all Latin
religion has a practical side--of enabling the stone to be identified in
the future. But Ovid[174] gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative
rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the
_religio terminorum_. The boundary-stone is garlanded, and an altar is
built; the fire is carried from the hearth of the homestead by a
materfamilias, the priestess of the family; a young son of the family
holds a basket full of fruits of the earth, and a little daughter shakes
these into the fire and offers honey-cakes. Others stand by with wine,
or look on in silence, clothed in white. The victims are lamb and
sucking-pig, and the stone is sprinkled with their blood, an act which
all the world over shows that an object is holy and tenanted by a
spirit.[175] And the ceremony ends with a feast and hymns in honour of
holy Terminus, who in Ovid's time in the rural districts, and long
before on the Capitolium of Rome, had risen from the spirit sanctifying
the stone to become a deity, closely connected with Jupiter himself, and
to give his name to a yearly city festival on February 23.

These festivals on the land were, some of them at least, scenes of
revelry, accompanied with dancing and singing, as the poets describe
them, the faces of the peasants painted red with minium,[176] according
to an old Italian custom which survived in the case of the triumphator
of the glorious days of the City-state. But if we may now return for a
moment to the homestead, there were events of great importance to the
family which were celebrated there in more serious and sober fashion,
with rites that were in part truly religious, yet not without some
features that show the prevailing anxiety, rooted in the age of taboo,
which we le