mplore
the deities of the city to preserve it and all within it. The language
of these prayers hardly differs from that in which a Christian Church of
to-day asks for a blessing on a community.[453]

So far I have been speaking of the permanent separation of land or city
by a sacred boundary line from the profane world without. But human
beings _en masse_ might be subjected to the same process--an army, for
example, at the opening of the season of war; and so, too, might its
appurtenances--horses, arms, and trumpets. In the account of the census
and _lustrum_ in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
who passed some years in Rome in the time of Augustus, we find the
_suovetaurilia_ driven three times round the assembled host and
sacrificed to Mars. This was doubtless the early form of the political
census, which had a military meaning and origin. But we have a more
exact and reliable account of a similar rite in the Iguvian documents,
which contain instructions for the _lustratio_ of the people apparently
before a campaign.[454] So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text,
the male population was assembled in a particular spot in its military
divisions, and round this host a procession went three times; at the end
of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer to Mars and two female
associates of his power, the object of which, as we can read in the
words of the prayer, was to bless the people of Iguvium and to curse its
enemies, who were to be confounded and frightened and paralysed.

Here religion of a rude sort has been superimposed on the originally
magical ceremonial. For the idea must have been that by drawing a "magic
circle" around the host, which might have to march against enemies
living far beyond the pale of the _ager Romanus_ (or Iguvinus), where
hostile magical influences might be brought to bear against them, they
were in some mysterious way marked off, rendered "holy," and so
protected against the wiles of the enemy. A later and animistic age
would think of them as needing protection against hostile spirits, of
whose ways and freaks they were of course entirely ignorant. Of these
primitive ideas about the danger of entering hostile territory and of
leaving your own, Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in his _Golden
Bough_ (i. 304 foll.), both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. A
single parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which Dr. Frazer has
not mentioned, may suffic