What we know of the cult is only this. First, it was peculiar, so far as we know, to Rome and Bovillae[478]; secondly, the temples in Rome were in the space between the arx and Capitolium, ‘inter duos lucos’[479], and another in the Tiber island[480]—two places outside the Servian wall, and of importance for the security of the city; thirdly, the god was represented as young, holding arrows, and having a goat standing beside him, on account of which characteristics he was usually, according to Gellius, identified with Apollo[481]; fourthly, the usual victim was a goat which was sacrificed _humano ritu_[482]. On such faint traces it will be obvious that no sound conclusion can be based. The connexion with Bovillae and the gens Julia points to a genuine Latin origin. The sites on the Capitol and the island do not lead to any definite conclusion; in the former the god seems to have been connected with the so-called Asylum, in the latter with Aesculapius; but both these connexions may be accidental or later developments. Preller conjectured cleverly that Vediovis was a god of criminals who might take refuge in Rome and there find purification; but the idea of an Asylum, on which this is based, is Greek, and of much later date than any age which could have given a definite meaning to such a deity. We must here, as occasionally elsewhere, give up the attempt to discover the original nature of this god. X KAL. IUN. (MAY 23). NP. TUBIL[USTRIUM]. (ESQ. CAER. VEN. MAFF.) FER[IAE] VOLCANO. (VEN. AMIT.) I have already explained[483] the view taken by Mommsen of the two pairs of days, March 23 and 24 and May 23 and 24, accepting his theory that the 24th in each month was the day on which wills could be made and witnessed in the Comitia calata, and that the 23rd in each month was the day on which the _tubae_ were lustrated by which the assembly was summoned. But May 23 is also marked in two calendars as _feriae Volcano_; and Ovid has noticed this in a single couplet:[484] Proxima Volcani lux est: Tubilustria dicunt; Lustrantur purae, quas facit ille, tubae. The difficult question of the original character of Volcanus must be postponed until we come to his festival in August. We only need here to ask whether Ovid was right in regarding Volcanus as the smith who made the trumpets. This has been strenuously denied by Wissowa[485], who goes so far as to believe that the deity originally invoked on this day was not Volcanus but Mars—since the corresponding day in March was a festival of that deity—and that Volcanus was at an early period thrust into his place under the influence of Greek notions of Hephaestus as a smith who made armour and also trumpets. Wissowa has, however, to throw over the two calendars quoted above (Ven. Amit.) in order to support his argument—and so far we are hardly entitled to go.