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During the Feriae, prefects, boys and beardless youths, appointed by Caesar and sprung from knights but not from senators, directed ceremonies. Also Aemilius Lepidus Paulus constructed at his own expense the so-called Porticus Pauli and dedicated it in his consulship; for he was consul a portion of that year.
Perhaps more scrupulously than the feriae were observed the dies religiosi, days of 'abstinence, on which certain acts, such as marriage, the beginning of any new piece of work, or the offering of sacrifice to the gods, were forbidden: such, in the oldest period, were the days on which the mundus was open, or the temple of Vesta received the matrons, the days when the Salii carried the ancilia in procession, and the periods of the two festivals of the dead in February and May; but for eluding their observance too devices were not unknown.
Cicero, drawing up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum, writes thus of feriae: "Feriis iurgia amovento, easque in familiis, operibus patratis, habento": which he afterwards explains as meaning that the citizen must abstain from litigation, and the slave be excused from labour.
So the old religious word feriae becomes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amusement, by the word ludi, and came at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the holidays of schoolboys.
The root-notion of feriae was a day set apart for the worship of the gods, and on it therefore the citizen ought to do 'no manner of work. The state observed this condition fully in the closing of law-courts and the absence of legislative assemblies, and in theory too the private citizen must refrain from any act which was not concerned with the worship of the gods, or rendered absolutely necessary, as, for instance, if 'his ox or his ass should fall into a pit. But it is characteristic of Rome that the state did not seek for offence, but only punished it if accidentally seen: on a feast-day the rex sacrorum and the flamines might not see work being done; they therefore sent on a herald in advance to announce their presence, and an actual conviction involved a money-fine.
But of his ritual and character we know practically nothing: the ritual was obscured because his festival coincided with the much more popular festival of the curiae, the stultorum feriae: of his character, we can only conjecture that he was to the Colline settlement what Mars was to the Palatine, whereas later after the complete amalgamation he seems to have been distinguished from Mars as representing 'armed peace' rather than war an idea which is borne out by the associations of the closely allied word Quirites.
And any chance deeds of men seemed to point to the same end. During the Feriae the prefect of the city celebrated the festival of Latiaris, which neither belonged to him nor was ordinarily observed at that time, and the plebeian aediles offered to Ceres contests in armor in place of the horse-race.
They included the following incidents: the figure of the Mother of the Gods on the Palatine formerly facing the east turned around of its own accord to the west; that of Minerva held in honor near Mutina, where the most fighting was going on, sent forth after this a quantity of blood and milk; furthermore the consuls took their departure just before the Feriae Latinae; and there is no case where this happened that the forces fared well.
Bathe the parts with camomiles, pennyroyal, savias, bay-leaves, juniper-berries, rue, marjoram, feverfew. Take a handful each of nep, maidenhair, succory and betony leaves and make a decoction, and take three ounces of it, syrup of maidenhair, mugwort and succory, half an ounce of each. After she comes out of her bath, let her drink it off. Purge with Pill agaric, fleybany, corb, feriae.
These ludi will form the chief subject of this chapter; but we must first mention one or two of the old feriae which seem always to have remained occasions of holiday-making, at any rate for the lower classes of the population.
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