Now if we recall the fact that the entrance to the house and the entrance to a city were points of great moment, and the cause of constant anxiety to the early Italian mind, we may naturally infer that they would be in the care of some particular numen, and that his worship would be in the care of the head of the family or community--in the case of the city, in the care of the _rex_, whose duties of this kind were afterwards taken over by the priest called _rex sacrorum_. The fact that the word for an entrance was _ianus_ confirms this conjecture; Janus was perhaps the spirit guarding the entrance to the real wall of the earliest city, but when the city was enlarged in the age from which the calendar dates, a symbolic gateway was set up where you entered the forum from the direction of Latium, answering to the symbolic hearth in the _aedes Vestae_, and this very naturally took the name of the deity associated with entrances. Two other _iani_ probably existed in the forum, and the name was later on transferred as a substantive to similar objects in Roman colonies, while a feminine form, _ianua_, came to be used for ordinary house entrances.[251] Whether there ever was a cult of the god at the real gateway of a city we do not know; there was none at the symbolic gateway of Rome, which was in no sense a temple. But the idea of entrance stuck to the old spirit of the doorway long after the reconstruction of the city, and the rex now sacrifices to him on the entrance-day of each month, and more particularly on the entrance-day of the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the original Janus,[252] a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious double-head on the _as_ and the gateway, and for whom they could find no conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.