_[Regifugium notatur in fastis dies a.d.] vi kal. [Mart. qui creditur sic dict]us quia [eo die Tarquinius rex fugerit ex urbe]. Quod fal[sum est; nam e castris in exilium abisse cum r]ettul[erunt annales. Rectius explicabit qui regem e]t Salios[1486] [hoc die ... facere sacri]ficium in [comitio eoque perfecto illum inde fugere n]overit ..._ It may be said that this is all guesswork, and no evidence; but it is borne out by the following passage in Plutarch’s sixty-third Roman question: Ἔστι γοῦν τις ἐν ἀγορᾷ θυσία πρὸς τῷ λεγομένῳ Κομητίῳ πάτριος, ἣν θύσας ὁ Βασιλεὺς κατὰ τάχος ἄπεισι Φεύγων ἐξ ἀγορϡας. Whence Plutarch drew this statement we cannot tell. He does not give the day on which the sacrifice and flight took place; and Huschke[1487] has denied that he refers to the Regifugium at all. He believes that Plutarch is thinking of the days marked Q. R. C. F. (March 24 and May 24), on which Varro says, or seems to say, that the Rex sacrorum sacrificed in the Comitium[1488]; and this may have been so, for the note in the Fasti Praenestini on March 24 shows that there was a popular misinterpretation of Q. R. C. F., which took the letters to mean, ‘quod eo die ex comitio fugerit rex.’ In this confusion we can but appeal to the word Regifugium, which is attached to Feb. 24 only. Taking this together with Plutarch’s statement, and remembering the great improbability of the historical explanation being the true one, we are justified in accepting Mommsen’s completion of the passage in Festus, and in concluding that there was really on Feb. 24 a flight of the Rex after a sacrifice. And this view is strengthened by the frequent occurrence of sacerdotal flights in ancient and primitive religions. These were first collected by Lobeck[1489], and have of late been treated of and variously explained by Mannhardt, Frazer, and Robertson Smith[1490]. The best known examples are those of the Bouphonia (‘ox murder’) at Athens, in which every feature shows that the slain ox was regarded, ‘not merely as a victim offered to a god, but in itself a sacred creature, the slaughter of which was sacrilege or murder’[1491]; and the sacrifice of a bull-calf to Dionysus at Tenedos, where the priest was attacked with stones, and had to flee for his life[1492]. We do not yet know for certain whether the origin of these ideas is to be found in totemism, or in the sanctity of cattle in the pastoral age, or in the representation of the spirit of vegetation in animal form. The second of these explanations, as elucidated by Robertson Smith, would seem most applicable to the Athenian rite; but in the case of the Roman one, we do not know what the victim was. It is also just possible, as Hartung long ago suggested[1493], that the victim was a scapegoat carrying away pollution, and therefore to be avoided; but I do not find any example of flight from a scapegoat, among the many instances collected by Mr. Frazer (_Golden Bough_, ii. 182 foll.).