United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the next place, the maid-servants, gaily dressed, run about, playing and jesting upon all they meet, and amongst themselves, also, use a kind of skirmishing, to show they helped in the conflict against the Latins; and while eating and drinking, they sit shaded over with boughs of wild fig-tree, and the day they call Nonae Caprotinae, as some think from that wild fig-tree on which the maid- servant held up her torch, the Roman name for a wild fig-tree being caprificus.
They call this day the nonae caprotinae, probably from the wild fig-tree from which the slave girl waved the torch; for in Latin a wild fig-tree is called caprificus.
Another fig-tree with a similar history is the caprificus of the Campus Martius, subsequently the site of the worship of Iuno Caprotina. A more significant case is the sacred oak of Iuppiter Feretrius on the Capitol, on which the spolia opima were hung after the triumph probably in early times a dedication of the booty to the spirit inhabiting the tree.
They, when they saw it, eagerly ran out of the gates, calling in their haste to each other as they went out, and so, falling in unexpectedly upon the enemy, they defeated them, and upon that made a feast of triumph, called the Nones of the Goats, because of the wild fig-tree, called by the Romans Caprificus, or the goat-fig.
As they fell unexpectedly upon the enemy, they routed them, and keep the day as a feast. Therefore the Nones are called Caprotinae because of the fig-tree, which the Romans call caprificus, and the women are feasted out of doors, under the shade of fig-tree boughs.
Word Of The Day