ese _vota_. Still more elaborate,
and probably more antique, is the famous formula of the vow of the _ver
sacrum_ in the darkest hour of the war with Hannibal.[416] This very
curious rite, which proves beyond question the devotion of the Italian
stocks to the principle of the _votum_, consisted of a promise to
dedicate to Mars or Jupiter all the valuable products of a single
spring, including the male children born at that time; to this the
Romans had recourse for the last time in 217 B.C., and Livy has
fortunately preserved the words of the vow. These, with the exception of
the dedication of the children, which is judiciously omitted, probably
stand much as they had come down from a remote antiquity. The _votum_ is
put in the form of a _rogatio_ to the people, without whose sanction it
could not be put in force; are they willing to dedicate to Jupiter all
the young of oxen, sheep, or pigs born in the spring five years after
date, if the State shall have been preserved during those years from all
its enemies? The curious feature of the document is, not that it binds
the deity to any course of action, but that it secures the individual
Roman against his anger in case of any chance slip in his part of the
process, and the people against any evil consequences arising from such
a slip or from misdoing on the part of an individual. "Si quis clepsit,
ne populo scelus esto neve cui cleptum erit: si atro die faxit insciens,
probe factum esto."[417] Of this formula a recent writer of great
learning and ability has written thus: "The well-known liturgical
archive containing Rome's address to Jupiter in the critical days of the
Hannibalic war is a wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to
bind the god as well as the State."[418] He is no exception to the rule
that those who have not habitually occupied themselves with the Roman
religion are liable to misinterpret its details. This is not an address
to Jupiter, nor is there any sign in it that the god was considered as
bound to perform his part as in a contract; the covenant is a one-sided
one, the people undertaking an act of self-renunciation if the god be
gracious to them, and thereby going far to assure themselves that he
will so be gracious. And the legal cast of the language, which seems so
apt to mislead the unwary,[419] is only to be found in the clauses which
guarantee the people against the contingency of the whole vow being
ruined by the inadvertence or the rasca