Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another _festa_ of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their cattle in the summer;[169] by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,[170] who on the Nones of December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding peacefully on the winter pasture:-- ludit herboso pecus omne campo cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres: festus in _pratis_ vacat otioso cum bove pagus. There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety--a matter in which the feeling of anxiety and awe (_religio_) brought with it, to use an expression of Cicero's, both _cura_ and _caerimonia_.[171] The _religio terminorum_ is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical times, from the Roman writers on _agrimetatio_; and with their help the whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume of the _Gromatici_.[172] We know that many different objects might serve as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees and stones; and in the case of the latter, which would be the usual _termini_ in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and carefully fixed."[173] This had the practical effect--for all Latin religion has a practical side--of enabling the stone to be identified in the future. But Ovid[174] gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the