_Hostis vinctus mulier virgo exesto._ We have noticed traces of taboo on women and strangers: what of the _vinctus_? This is, so far as I know, the only proof we have that a man in chains was thought to be religiously dangerous. I am not sure how his expulsion from religious rites is to be explained. It is, however, as well to note that criminals were in primitive societies thought to be uncanny, probably because the commonest of all crimes, if not the only one affecting society as a whole, was the breaking of taboo, which made the individual an outcast.[47] And we may put this together with the fact that in the early City-state such outcasts were probably not kept shut up in a prison, but allowed to wander about secured with chains; this seems a fair inference from the power which the priest of Jupiter (_Flamen Dialis_) possessed of releasing from his chains any prisoner who entered his house, _i.e._ who had taken refuge there as in an asylum.[48] Thus the fettered criminal, who was certainly not a citizen, might find his way to the place where a sacrifice was going on, and have to submit to expulsion together with the strangers. It is, however, also possible that the iron of the chains, if they were of iron, made him doubly dangerous; for, as we shall see directly, iron was taboo, and the chains of the prisoner who took refuge with the Flamen had to be thrown out of the house, no doubt for this reason, by the _impluvium_.[49] Turning to inanimate objects, which are supposed by primitive man to be dangerous or taboo, we are met by a fact which will astonish anthropologists, and which I cannot satisfactorily explain. Blood is everywhere in the savage world regarded with suspicion and anxiety; there is something mysterious about it as containing (so they thought) the life, and its colour and smell are also uncanny; horses cannot endure it, and there are still strong men who faint at the sight of it. Yet at Rome, so far as I can discover, there was in historical times hardly a trace left of this anxiety in its original form of taboo; the religious law had effectually eliminated the various chances that might arouse it. No student of Roman religious antiquities seems to have noticed this singular fact. No anthropologist, as far as I know, has observed that among the many taboos to which the Flamen Dialis was subject, blood does not appear. The reason no doubt is that anthropologists are not as a rule Roman historians; their curiosity is not excited by a fact which must have some explanation in Roman religious history. From a single passage of Festus (p. 117) we learn that soldiers following the triumphal car carried laurel "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem"; and this is the only distinct relic of the idea that I can find. Pliny's _Natural History_, that wonderful thesaurus of odds and ends, affords no help; the mystic qualities of blood are hardly alluded to there, and the same can be said of Servius' commentary on the _Aeneid_.