Produced by Ted Garvin, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. Transcriber’s Note: This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects. Italics are delimited with the underscore character as _italic_. Bold face type is delimited with the equals sign as =bold=. Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced. The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic THE ROMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE REPUBLIC AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS BY W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. FELLOW AND SUB-RECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1899 _All rights reserved_ OXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY FRATRIS FILIIS I. C. H. F H. G. C. F BONAE SPEI ADOLESCENTIBUS PREFACE A word of explanation seems needed about the form this book has taken. Many years ago I became specially interested in the old Roman religion, chiefly, I think, through studying Plutarch’s _Quaestiones Romanae_, at a time when bad eyesight was compelling me to abandon a project for an elaborate study of all Plutarch’s works. The ‘scrappy’ character not only of the _Quaestiones_, but of all the material for the study of Roman ritual, suited weak eyes better than the continual reading of Greek text; but I soon found it necessary to discover a thread on which to hang these fragments in some regular order. This I naturally found in the _Fasti_ as edited by Mommsen in the first volume of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_; and it gradually dawned on me that the only scientific way of treating the subject was to follow the calendar throughout the year, and to deal with each festival separately. I had advanced some way in this work, when Roscher’s _Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology_ began to appear in parts, and at once convinced me that I should have to do my work all over again in the increased light afforded by the indefatigable industry of the writers of the Roman articles. I therefore dropped my work for several years while the Lexicon was in progress, and should have waited still longer for its completion, had not Messrs. Macmillan invited me to contribute a volume on the Roman religion to their series of _Handbooks of Archaeology and Antiquities_.