locks and herds, and
deprecating the anger of the Almighty.[445]

But let us now pass briefly in review the more important of these rites
of lustration and compare them with each other; we shall find the
essential features the same in all of them.

The first permanent difficulty of new settlers in Latium was to mark off
their cultivated land from the forest or waste land beyond it, and so,
as M. van Gennep would phrase it,[446] to make a margin of separation
between the sacred and the profane, within which the sacred processes of
domestic life and husbandry might go forward, undisturbed by
dangers--human, spiritual, or what not--coming from the profane world
without. The boundary was marked out in some material way, perhaps by
stones (_cippi_) or posts, placed at intervals;[447] and thus "a fixed
piece of ground is appropriated by a particular social group, so that if
any stranger penetrated it he would be committing a sacrilege as
complete as he would if he trespassed in a sacred grove or a temple."
This boundary-line was made sacred itself by the passage round it
(_lustratio_) at some fixed time of the year, usually in May, when crops
were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile
influences, of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. The two
main features of the rite, as formulated by Cato in his treatise on
agriculture, are--1, the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig
(_suovetaurilia_), the farmer's most valuable property; 2, the prayer to
Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly
protection of the whole _familia_ of the farm, together with the crops
of all kinds and the cattle within the boundary-line.[448] We are not
expressly told that this procession followed the boundary throughout,
but the analogy of other lustrations forbids us to doubt it; and thus
the rite served the practical purpose of keeping it clear in the
memory,--a matter of the utmost importance, especially for the practical
Roman. In Cato's formula the farmer's object is to ward off disease,
calamity, dearth, and infertility; and it is Mars who is invoked, _i.e._
a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal
spirits; but we may safely believe that the primitive farmer used other
language, addressing the spirits of disease and dearth themselves; and
we may guess, if we will, that again before that there was no invocation
or sacrifice at all, but that the object was o