ovements come?
This is only another way of asking the question, Whence did Minerva
come?

By the common consent of investigators she came from the semi-Latin town
of Falerii in southern Etruria, where these arts were practised by
Etruscans, or those who had learnt of Etruscans.[484] Her name is
Italian, not Etruscan;[485] she was an old Italian deity taken over by
the invading Etruscans from the peoples whose land they occupied. But
while in the hands of Etruscans she had adopted Greek characteristics,
especially those of Athene, the patroness of arts and crafts. She soon,
indeed, appeared with some of the character of Athene Polias, as we
shall see at the end of this lecture; but her real importance, far down
into the period of the Empire, was in the temple on the Aventine, and in
connection with the crafts. The dedication day of the temple was March
19, which was known, as we learn on the best authority, also as
_artificum dies_.[486]

There was another famous temple on the Aventine which by universal
consent is attributed to the same period as that of Minerva. Diana does
not appear in the calendar, and had no _flamen_; Roman tradition
ascribed her arrival to Servius Tullius, and we shall not be far wrong
if we place it at or towards the end of the age of the kingship. The
temple was celebrated as containing an ancient statue of Diana, the
oldest or almost the oldest representation of a deity in human form
known at Rome, which was a copy of a rude image of Artemis at Massilia,
of the type of the famous [Greek: xoanon] of the Ephesian Artemis.[487]
It also contained a _lex templi_ in Greek characters, and a treaty or
charter of a federation of Latin cities with Rome as their head, which
was seen by Dionysius of Halicarnassus when in Rome in the time of
Augustus.[488]

The explanation of the arrival of Diana is simple. The _dies natalis_ of
the temple is the same as that of the famous shrine of the same goddess
at Aricia--the Ides of August.[489] Aricia was at this time the centre
of a league of cities including Tusculum and Tibur, with both of which,
as we have just seen, Rome was closely connected at this time; a league
which is generally supposed to have superseded that of Alba, marking
some revolution in Latium consequent on the fall of Alba.[490] Diana
was a wood-spirit, a tree-spirit, as Dr. Frazer has taught us, with some
relation to the moon and to the life of women; of late she has become
familiar to every