was here worshipped as the patroness of domestic animals as well as of the wild creatures of the wood.​[23] In like manner her Greek counterpart Artemis was a goddess not only of game but of herds. Thus her sanctuary in the highlands of north-western Arcadia, between Clitor and Cynaethae, owned sacred cattle which were driven off by Aetolian freebooters on one of their forays.​[24] When Xenophon returned from the wars and settled on his estate among the wooded hills and green meadows of the rich valley through which the Alpheus flows past Olympia, he dedicated to Artemis a little temple on the model of her great temple at Ephesus, surrounded it with a grove of all kinds of fruit-trees, and endowed it not only with a chase but also with a sacred pasture. The chase abounded in fish and game of all sorts, and the pasture sufficed to rear swine, goats, oxen, and horses; and on her yearly festival the pious soldier sacrificed to the goddess a tithe both of the cattle from the sacred pasture and of the game from the sacred chase.​[25] Again, the people of Hyampolis in Phocis worshipped Artemis and thought that no cattle throve like those which they dedicated to her.​[26] Perhaps then the images of cattle found in Diana’s precinct at Nemi were offered to her by herdsmen to ensure her blessing on their herds. In Catholic Germany at the present time the great patron of cattle, horses, and pigs is St. Leonhard, and models of cattle, horses, and pigs are dedicated to him, sometimes in order to ensure the health and increase of the flocks and herds through the coming year, sometimes in order to {p8} obtain the recovery of sick animals.​[27] And, curiously enough, like Diana of Aricia, St. Leonhard is also expected to help women in travail and to bless barren wives with offspring.​[28] Nor do these points exhaust the analogy between St. Leonard and Diana of Aricia; for like the goddess the saint heals the sick; he is the patron of prisoners, as she was of runaway slaves; and his shrines, like hers, enjoyed the right of asylum.​[29] [Sidenote: Nemi an image of Italy in the olden time.] So to the last, in spite of a few villas peeping out here and there from among the trees, Nemi seems to have remained in some sense an image of what Italy had been in the far-off days when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen, when the beechwoods and oakwoods, with their deciduous foliage, reddening in autumn and bare in winter, had not yet begun, under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those intruders of a later age, which nowadays we are apt to think of as characteristically Italian, the lemon and the orange.​[30] [Sidenote: Rule of succession to the priesthood of Diana at Nemi.]