Yet another legend was attached to this day. It was said that the original _ancile_, or sacred shield of Mars, fell down from heaven[77], or was found in the house of Numa[78], on March 1. This was the type from which were copied the other eleven belonging to the collegium of Salii Palatini; in the legend the smith who did this work was named Mamurius, and was commemorated in the Salian hymn[79]. These are simply fragments of a tangle of myth which grew up out of the mystery attaching to the Salii, or dancing priests of Mars, and to the curious shields which they carried, and the hymns which they sang[80]; in the latter we know that the word _Mamuri_ often occurred, which is now generally recognized as being only a variant of the name Mars[81]. We shall meet with the word again later in the month. This also was the first day on which the shields were ‘moved,’ as it was called; i. e. taken by the Salii from the _sacrarium Martis_ in the Regia[82], and carried through the city in procession. Dionysius (ii. 70) has left us a valuable description of these processions, which continued till the 24th of the month; the Salii leaped and danced, reminding the writer of the Greek Curetes, and continually struck the shields with a short spear or staff[83] as they sang their ancient hymns and performed their rhythmical dances. The original object and meaning of all these strange performances is now fairly well made out, thanks to the researches of Müllenhoff, Mannhardt, Roscher, Frazer and others. Roscher, in his comparison of Apollo and Mars[84], pointed out the likeness in the spring festivals of the two gods. At Delphi, at the Theophania (7th of Bysios = March), there were decorations, sacrifices, dances, and songs; and of these last, some were ὔμνοι κλητικοί, or invocations to the god to appear, some παιᾶνες, or shouts of encouragement in his great fight with the dragon, or perhaps intended to scare the dragon away. For Apollo was believed to return in the spring, to be born anew, and to struggle in his infancy with the demon of evil. At other places in Greece similar performances are found; at Delos[85], at Ortygia[86] near Ephesus, at Tegyra, and elsewhere. At Ortygia the Κουρῆτες stood and clashed their arms to frighten away Hera the enemy of Apollo’s mother Leto, in the annual dramatic representation of the perilous labour of the mother and the birth of her son. These practices (and similar ones among northern peoples) seem to be the result of the poetical mythology of an imaginative race acting on still more primitive ideas. From all parts of the world Mr. Frazer has collected examples of rites of this kind occurring at some period of real or supposed peril, and often at the opening of a new year, in which dances, howling, the beating of pots and pans, brandishing of arms, and even firing of guns are thought efficacious in driving out evil spirits which bring hurt of some kind to mankind or to the crops which are the fruits of his labour[87].