Ovid’s work merits all praise as a literary performance, for the neatness and felicity of its versification and diction; but as a source of knowledge it is too much of a medley to be used without careful criticism. There is, however, a great deal in it that helps us to understand the views about the gods and their worship, not only of the scholars who pleased themselves and Augustus by investigating these subjects, but also of the common people both in Rome and in the country. But the value varies greatly throughout the work. Where the poet describes some bit of ritual which he has himself seen, or tells some Italian story he has himself heard, he is invaluable; but as a substitute for the work of Varro on which he drew, he only increases our thirst for the original. No great scholar himself, he aimed at producing a popular account of the results of the work of scholars, picking and choosing here and there as suited his purpose, and not troubling himself to write with scientific accuracy. Moreover, he probably made free use of Alexandrine poets, and especially of Callimachus, whose _Aetia_ is in some degree his model for the whole poem; and thus it is that the work contains a large proportion of Greek myth, which is often hard to distinguish from the fragments of genuine Italian legend which are here and there imbedded in it. Still, when all is said, a student of the Roman religion should be grateful to Ovid; and when after the month of June we lose him as a companion, we may well feel that the subject not only loses with him what little literary interest it can boast of, but becomes for the most part a mere investigation of fossil rites, from which all life and meaning have departed for ever. VI. The Calendar of the Republic and its Religious Festivals. All the calendars still surviving belong, as we saw, to the early Empire, and represent the Fasti as revised by Julius. But what we have to do with is the calendar of the Republic. Can it be recovered from those we still possess? Fortunately this is quite an easy task, as Mommsen himself has pointed out[39]; we can reconstruct for certain the so-called calendar of Numa as it existed throughout the Republican era. The following considerations must be borne in mind: 1. It is certain that Caesar and his advisers would alter the familiar calendar as little as possible, acting in the spirit of persistent conservatism from which no true Roman was ever free. They added 10 days to the old normal year of 355 days, i. e. two at the end of January, August, and December, and one at the end of April, June, September, and November; but they retained the names of the months, and their division by Kalends, Nones, and Ides, and also the signs of the days, and the names of all festivals throughout the year. Later on further additions were made, chiefly in the way of glorification of the Emperors and their families; but the skeleton remained as it had been under the Republic.