The old calendar also supplies strong evidence that the arms and the trumpets of the host were lustrated, both before and after a campaign. On March 19, called _Quinquatrus_, because it was the fifth day after the Ides, the _ancilia_, or shields of the war-priests of Mars, were thus purified; and it is a good guess that they stood for the arms of the fighting men generally. For on October 19 we find the festival Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. On that day it seems clear that both arma and ancilia were lustrated, and that the Salii for this purpose went round the armed host in a place called by the same name as the rite, in or near the Circus maximus (Varro, _L.L._ 6. 22: cf. 5. 153). Again, we have March 23 marked in the calendar as Tubilustrium; and though the old explanations confine these _tubae_ to such as were used _in sacris_, I believe, with Wissowa, that included in these were the trumpets of the host.[127] Lastly, we may believe that the army was purified from the taint of bloodshed after its return from a campaign, just as the Hebrew warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp after a battle (Num. xxi. 19). I have just now suggested that the sacrifice of the October horse may have originally had this object. But in Roman pontifical law the idea of the taint of bloodshed is only faintly discernible, as is also the case in the Homeric poems (Farnell, _Evolution_, p. 133); and the only distinct trace of it that I can find in regard to the army is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general’s car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ‘ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem’ (_Fest._ 117). Laurel was a powerful purgative of such taint.