Now there can be no doubt about the great importance of woods, or rather of clearings in them, in the ancient Italian religion. ‘_Nemus_ and _lucus_,’ says Preller[769], ‘like so many other words, remind us of the old Italian life of woodland and clearing. _Nemus_ is a pasturage, _lucus_ a “light” or clearing[770], in the forest, where men settled and immediately began to look to the interests of the spirits of the woodland, and especially of Silvanus, who is at once the god of the wild life of the woodland and of the settler in the forest—the backwoodsman.’ The woods left standing as civilization and agriculture advanced continued to be the abodes of _numina_, not only of the great Jupiter, who, as we shall see, was worshipped in groves all over Italy[771], and of Diana, who at Aricia bore the title of Nemorensis, but of innumerable spirits of the old worship, Fauni, Silvani, and other manifestations of the idea most definitely conceived in the great god Mars[772]. But men could not of course know for certain what spirits dwelt in a wood, whose anger might be roused by intrusion or tree-felling; and old Cato, among his many prescriptions, material and religious, gives one in the form of an invocation to such unknown deities if an intrusion had to be made. It is worth quoting, and runs as follows[773]: ‘Lucum conlucare Romano more sic oportet. Porco piaculo facito. Sic verba concipito: Si Deus, si Dea es, quoium illud sacrum est, uti tibi ius siet porco piaculo facere, illiusce sacri coercendi ergo. Harumce rerum ergo, sive ego, sive quis iussu meo fecerit, uti id recte factum siet. Eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo immolando bonas preces precor, uti sies volens propitius mihi, domo familiaeque meae, liberisque meis. Harumce rerum ergo macte hoc porco piaculo immolando esto.’ Applying these facts to the problem of the Lucaria, though necessarily with hesitation, and remembering the position of the wood and the date of the festival, we may perhaps arrive at the following conclusion; that this was a propitiatory worship offered to the deities inhabiting the woods which bordered on the cultivated Roman ager. The time when the corn was being gathered in, and the men and women were in the fields, would be by no means unsuitable for such propitiation. It need not have been addressed to any special deity, any more than that of Cato, or as I believe, the ritual of the Lupercalia[774]; it belonged to the most primitive of Roman rites, and partly for that reason, partly also from the absorption of land by large private owners[775], it fell into desuetude. The grove of the Fratres Arvales and the decay of their cult (also addressed to a nameless deity) offers an analogy on the other side of Rome, towards Ostia.