and comments thus[1133]: ‘Fauni dii Latinorum, ita ut Faunus et Fauna sit.’ The evidence of Virgil, always valuable for rural antiquities, is equally clear: Et vos agrestum praesentia numina, Fauni, Ferte simul Faunique pedem Dryadesque puellae[1134]. Servius has an interesting note on these lines: why, he asks, does the poet put Faunus in the plural, when there is but one? We might be tempted to think Virgil wrong and his commentator right, the poet representing Greek ideas and the scholar Italian, but for a still more curious note of Probus on the same passage: ‘Plures (Fauni) existimantur esse etiam praesentes: idcirco rusticis persuasum est incolentibus eam partem Italiae quae suburbana est, saepe eos in agris conspici.’ My belief is that these words give us the genuine idea of Faunus in the rustic mind, surviving in central Italy long after he had been appropriated as a conventional Roman deity. We seem in the case of Faunus to be able to catch a deity in the process of manufacture—of elevation from a lower, multiplex, daemonistic form, to a higher and more uniform and more rigid one. Yet so excellent a scholar as Wissowa holds exactly the opposite view, that there was but one Faunus, and that his multiplication is simply the result of Roman acquaintance with Pan and the Satyrs[1135]. It would have been more satisfactory if he had given us an explanation from his point of view of the passage of Probus just quoted, or had shown us how these Greek notions could have penetrated into the rural parts of Italy. (2) Another point which comes out distinctly—unless our Roman authorities were wholly misled—is the _woodland_ character of the Fauni. A passage of Varro, of which I quoted the first words just now, goes on thus: ‘hos versibus quos vocant Saturnios _in silvestribus locis_ traditum est solitos fari futura, a quo fando Faunos dictos.’ This seems to be a genuine Italian tradition. Virgil was not talking Greek when he wrote[1136] Haec nemora indigenae Fauni Nymphaeque tenebant Gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata, Queis neque mos neque cultus erat, &c.