The first point to notice is that the festival was both public and private, urban and rustic[261]. Ovid clearly distinguishes the two; lines 721-734 deal with the urban festival, 735-782 with the rustic. The explanations which follow deal with both. Pales, the deity (apparently both masculine and feminine[262]) whose name the festival bears, was, like Faunus, a common deity of Italian pasture land. A Palatium was said by Varro to have been named after Pales at Reate, in the heart of the Sabine hill-country[263]; and though this may not go for much, the character of the Parilia, and the fact that Pales is called _rusticola_, _pastoricia_, _silvicola_, &c., are sufficient to show the original non-urban character of the deity. He (or she) was a shepherd’s deity of the simplest kind, and survived in Rome as little more than a name[264] from the oldest times, when the earliest invaders drove their cattle through the Sabine mountains. Here, then, we seem to have a clear example of a rite which was originally a rustic one, and survived as such, while at the same time one local form of it was kept up in the great city, and had become entangled with legend and probably altered in some points of ritual. We will take the rustic form first. Here we may distinguish in Ovid’s account[265] the following ritualistic acts. 1. The sheep-fold[266] was decked with green boughs and a great wreath was hung on the gate: Frondibus et fixis decorentur ovilia ramis, Et tegat ornatas longa corona fores. With this Mannhardt[267] aptly compares the like concomitants of the midsummer fires in North Germany, Scotland, and England. In Scotland, for example, before the bonfires were kindled on midsummer eve, the houses were decorated with foliage brought from the woods[268]. The custom of decoration at special seasons, May-day, mid-summer, harvest, and Christmas, is even now, with the exception of midsummer, universal, and is probably descended from these primitive rites, by which our ancestors sought in some mysterious way to influence the working of the powers of vegetation. 2. At the earliest glimmer of daybreak the shepherd purified the sheep. This was done by sprinkling and sweeping the fold; then a fire was made of heaps of straw, olive-branches, and laurel, to give good omen by the crackling, and through this apparently the shepherds leapt, and the flocks were driven[269]. For this we have, of course, numerous parallels from all parts of the world. Burning sulphur was also used: Caerulei fiant vivo de sulfure fumi Tactaque fumanti sulfure balet ovis[270].