At her annual festival, which, as we have just seen, was celebrated all over Italy on the thirteenth of August, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a purificatory ceremony in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a kid, cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs.​[48] The Christian Church appears to have sanctified this great festival of the virgin goddess by adroitly converting it into the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin on the fifteenth of August.​[49] The discrepancy of two days between the dates of the festivals is not a fatal argument against their identity; for a similar displacement of two days occurs in the case of St. George’s festival on the twenty-third of April, which is probably identical with the ancient Roman festival of the Parilia on April twenty-first.​[50] On the reasons which prompted this conversion of the festival of the Virgin Diana into the festival of the Virgin Mary, some light is thrown by a passage in the Syriac text of _The Departure of My Lady Mary from this World_, which runs thus: “And the apostles also ordered that there should be a commemoration of the blessed one on the thirteenth of Ab [that is, August; another MS. reads the 15th of Ab], on account of the vines bearing bunches (of grapes), and on account of the trees bearing fruit, that clouds of hail, bearing stones of wrath, might not come, and the trees be broken, and their fruits, and the vines with their clusters.”​[51] Here the festival of {p15} the Assumption of the Virgin is definitely said to have been fixed on the thirteenth or fifteenth of August for the sake of protecting the ripening grapes and other fruits. Similarly in the Arabic text of the apocryphal work _On the Passing of the Blessed Virgin Mary_, which is attributed to the Apostle John, there occurs the following passage: “Also a festival in her honour was instituted on the fifteenth day of the month Ab [that is, August], which is the day of her passing from this world, the day on which the miracles were performed, and the time when the fruits of trees are ripening.”​[52] Further, in the calendars of the Syrian Church the fifteenth of August is repeatedly designated as the festival of the Mother of God “for the vines”;​[53] and to this day in Greece the ripening grapes and other fruits are brought to the churches to be blest by the priests on the fifteenth of August.​[54] Now we hear of vineyards and plantations dedicated to Artemis, fruits offered to her, and her temple standing in an orchard.​[55] Hence we may conjecture that her Italian sister Diana was also revered as a patroness of vines and fruit-trees, and that on the thirteenth of August the {p16} owners of vineyards and orchards paid their respects to her at Nemi along with other classes of the community. We have just seen that wine and apples still hanging on the boughs formed part of