Of the numerous petty divinities which watched over the child's early years we have already given some account. In their protection he remained until he arrived at puberty, about the age of seventeen, when with due religious ceremony he entered on his manhood. At home, on the morning of the festival, he solemnly laid aside the _bulla_ and the purple-striped garb of childhood (_toga praetexta_) before the shrine of the household gods, and made them a thank-offering for their protection in the past. Afterwards, accompanied by his father and friends and clad now in the _toga virilis_, he went solemnly to the Capitol, and, after placing a contribution in the coffers of Iuventas--or probably in earlier times of Iuppiter Iuventus--made an offering to the supreme deity Iuppiter Capitolinus. The sacred character of the early years of a young Roman's life could hardly be more closely marked. Though _confarreatio_ was the only essentially religious form of marriage, and was sanctified by the presence of the _pontifex maximus_ and the _flamen Dialis_, yet marriage even in the less religious ceremony of _coemptio_ was always a _sacrum_. It must not take place on the days of state-festivals (_feriae_), nor on certain other _dies religiosi_, such as those of the Vestalia or the feast of the dead (_Parentalia_). Both the marriage itself and the preliminary betrothal (_sponsalia_) had to receive the divine sanction by means of auspices, and in the ceremonies of both rites the religious element, though bound up with superstition and folk-customs, emerges clearly enough. The central ceremony of the _confarreatio_ was an act partly of sacrifice, partly, one might almost say, of communion. The bride and bridegroom sat on two chairs united to one another and covered with a lambskin, they offered to Iuppiter bloodless offerings of a rustic character (_fruges et molam salsam_), they employed in the sacrifice the fundamental household necessaries, water, fire, and salt, and themselves ate of the sacred spelt-cake (_libus farreus_), from which the ceremony derived its name. The crucial point in the more civil ceremony of _coemptio_ was the purely human and legal act of the joining of hands (_dextrarum iunctio_), but it was immediately followed by the sacrifice of a victim, which gave the ceremony a markedly religious significance. The customs connected with the bringing of the bride to the bridegroom's house--so beautifully depicted in Catullus' _Epithalamium_--her forcible abduction from her parents, the ribaldry of the bridegroom's companions, the throwing of nuts as a symbol of fecundity, the carrying of the bride over the threshold, a relic probably of primitive marriage by capture, the untying of the bridal knot on the bridal couch--are perhaps more akin to superstition than religion, but we may notice two points in the proceedings. Firstly, the three coins (_asses_) which the bride brought with her, one to give to