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The old sacrificing priesthoods, such as the Fratres Arvales and the lesser Flamines, seem not to have been filled up by the pontifices whose duty it was to do so: and the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter himself, is not heard of from 89 to 11 B.C., when he appears again as a part of the Augustan religious restoration.
Plutarch telleth us that among the Romans the flamen of Jupiter was not permitted to swear, of which law among other reasons he assigned this: "Because it is not handsome that he to whom divine and greatest things are entrusted should be distrusted about small matters."
How far the custom of wearing finger-rings may have been influenced by, or even have sprung from, a belief in their efficacy as amulets to keep the soul in the body, or demons out of it, is a question which seems worth considering. Here we are only concerned with the belief in so far as it seems to throw light on the rule that the Flamen Dialis might not wear a ring unless it were broken.
Marcus Marcellus this year dedicated the temple of Virtue at the Porta Capena, in the seventeenth year after it had been vowed by his father during his first consulate at Clastidium in Gaul: also Marcus Aemilius Regillus, flamen of Mars, died this year. For the last two years the affairs of Greece had been neglected.
At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went. "It is time to go home, Bébée," said Flamen.
"Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you have been! and I am back again, you see, and I will work harder than ever because of all this joy that you have given me." And she took another moss-rose and changed it for that of the morning, which was faded, and said to Flamen. "Look she sends you this. Now do you know what I mean? One is more content when She is content."
Next he turned his attention to the appointment of priests, though he performed many sacred rites himself, especially those which now belong to the flamen of Jupiter.
On a sudden impulse Flamen, going through the woodland shadows to the city, paused and turned back; all his impulses were quick and swayed him now hither, now thither, in many contrary ways. He knew that the hour was come that he must leave her and spare her, as to himself he phrased it, or teach her the love words that the daisies whisper to women. And why not? anyway she would marry Jeannot.
"Might I know your name?" she had asked him wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud, and taken the volume in return that day. "They call me Flamen." "It is your name?" "Yes, for the world. You must call me Victor, as other women do. Why do you want my name?" "Jeannot asked it of me." "Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he?"
The next thing he did was to add to the two priests of Jupiter and Mars a third in honor of Romulus, whom he called the Flamen Quirinalis. The Romans anciently called their priests Flamines, by corruption of the word Pilamines, from a certain cap which they wore, called Pileus.
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