ocess, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but
without fully recognising its religious import.[194] It was not so much
thanksgiving (_Dankfest_) after a campaign that was necessary on the
return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of
bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and
spiritual.[195] On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the
Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with
peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall
presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any
special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry ARMILUSTRIUM,
which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these
days of October, and on the day of the Armilustrium, as it would seem,
put their shields away (_condere_) in their _sacrarium_ until the March
following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic
copy of the procedure of war.[196] From these indications in the
calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and
from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with
the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged
in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against
Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in
arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious
calendar.

The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the
division of the days of the year into two great groups, _dies fasti_
and _nefasti_: the former are those on which it is _fas_, _i.e._
religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on
which it would be _nefas_ to do so, _i.e._ sacrilege, because they are
given over to the gods. We need not, indeed, assume that these marks F
and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the
pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood
originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main
division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days
belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but
two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is
reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations.
The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread
superstition, and we do not need to have