The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, have been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower garlands, but with the Romans there was no such superposition and consequently no misunderstanding. They clearly realized two things, that February was the month of the dead, and that it was the month of purification. Plutarch in his _Roman Questions_[115] asks ‘Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice to the dead in December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and sacrifices to the dead in the month of February?’ In his twenty-fifth Question[116], while discussing the reasons why the days following respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were unlucky, he tells us that the Romans ‘used to consecrate the first month of the year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the gods of the earth, and in this second month (February) they were wont to practise certain purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.’ Athenaeus[117] states that ‘Juba the Mauretanian said that the month of February was so called from the terrors of the lower world, with regard to means taken for riddance from such alarms at the time when the winter is at its height, and it is the custom to offer libations to the dead on several days.’ Juba the Mauretanian must have known quite well that in February the winter was not at its height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the underworld, but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of this particular month. Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony is in part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book of the _Fasti_[118], after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the question of what the Romans meant by the word _februum_; he notes that the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch from a pine-tree, grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that ‘any thing by which the soul was purged was called by his rude ancestors _februum_.’ ‘Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantur, Hoc apud intonsos nomen habebat avos.’ The month he feels sure got its name from these ‘februa’ or purifications, but he asks ‘was it because the Luperci purified all the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification or atonement, or was it because when the _dies ferales_ were accomplished then _owing to the fact that the dead were appeased_ there was a season of purity?’ ‘Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci Omne solum lustrant idque piamen habent? Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris, Tunc cum ferales praeteriere dies?’ Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, he knows, cathartic: that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically and significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less could he conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion are in substance one.