the festal cheer on that day; in an ancient fresco found at Ostia a statue of Diana is depicted in company with a procession of children, some of whom bear clusters of grapes;​[56] and in a series of gems the goddess is represented with a branch of fruit in one hand and a cup, which is sometimes full of fruit, in the other.​[57] Catullus, too, tells us that Diana filled the husbandman’s barns with a bounteous harvest.​[58] In some parts of Italy and Sicily the day of the Assumption of the Virgin is still celebrated, like Diana’s day of old, with illuminations and bonfires; in many Sicilian parishes the corn is then brought in sacks to the churches to be blessed, and many persons, who have a favour to ask of the Virgin, vow to abstain from one or more kinds of fruit during the first fifteen days of August.​[59] Even in Scandinavia a relic of the worship of Diana survived in the custom of blessing the fruits of the earth of every sort, which in Catholic times was annually observed on the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin.​[60] There is no intrinsic improbability in the view that for the sake of edification the church may have converted a real heathen festival into a nominal Christian one. Similarly in the Armenian Church “according to the express evidence of the Armenian fathers of the year 700 and later, the day of the Virgin was placed on September the fifteenth, because that was the day of Anahite, the magnificence of whose feast the Christian doctors hoped thereby to transfer to Mary.”​[61] This Anahite or Anaitis, as the Greeks called her, the Armenian predecessor of the Virgin Mary, was a great Oriental goddess, {p17} whose worship was exceedingly popular not only in Armenia but in the adjoining countries. The loose character of her rites is plainly indicated by Strabo, himself a native of these regions.​[62] [Sidenote: The 13th of August a harvest festival among the Celts of Gaul.] Among the ancient Celts of Gaul, who, to judge by their speech, were near kinsmen of the ancient Latins, the thirteenth of August appears to have been the day when the harvest was dedicated to the harvest-god Rivos.​[63] If that was so, we may conjecture that the choice of a day in mid-August for the solemn celebration of the harvest-home dates from the remote time when the ancestors of the Celtic and Italian peoples, having renounced the wandering life of the huntsman and herdsman, had settled down together in some land of fertile soil and temperate climate, where harvest fell neither so late as after the cool rainy summers of the North nor so early as before the torrid and rainless summers of southern Europe. [Sidenote: Egeria, water-nymph and wife of Numa.]