United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Among the foreign acts thus ordered the sacred procession occurs frequently. It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius and passed into the city through the Porta Carmentalis, went across the Forum and then outside the pomerium again to the temple of Ceres, and then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine.
The hosts of Greek deities invaded and captured Rome under the leadership of the Sibylline books, and though at first they had been kept outside the pomerium, even this iron barrier was melted in the heat of the Second Punic War, and the new Greek gods swarmed into the city proper.
This space, which was forbidden to be tilled or inhabited, the Romans called pomerium, not so much from its being behind the wall, as from the wall being behind it: and in enlarging the boundaries of the city, these onsecrated limits were always extended, as far as the walls were intended to be advanced.
In the first place it is clear that the deities were felt to be foreign: not only was their temple built out the Aventine way, in the valley of the Circus Maximus, outside the pomerium, but a much more significant fact their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names instead, to make them seem less out of place.
Go then, lictor, bind those hands, which but a little while since, armed, won sovereignty for the Roman people. Go, cover the head of the liberator of this city: hang him on the accursed tree: scourge him, either within the pomerium, so it be only amid those javelins and spoils of the enemy, or without the pomerium, so it be only amid the graves of the Curiatii.
Cicero tells us that it was generally believed that the dead lived on beneath the earth, and special provision was made for them in every Latin town in the "mundus," a deep trench which was dug before the "pomerium" was traced, and regarded as the particular entrance to the lower world for the dead of the town in question.
Yet it was not the introduction of her worship as an ordinary state-cult, for then she would have been taken inside the pomerium with far greater right than Hercules and Castor were.
The wall, which Servius built and which continued to be the outer wall of Rome for a period of eight or nine hundred years until the third Christian century, was at the time of its building coincident in the main with the line of the pomerium, with one very important exception: namely that all the region of the Aventine, which was inside the limits of the political city and embraced by the Servian wall, lay outside the pomerium line and was in other words outside the religious city.
We do not know where the shrine of the old sweet-water Neptune had been, but his old festival had occurred on July 23. The new Poseidon-Neptune was given a temple outside the pomerium in the Campus Martius, but the new was connected with the old in so far at least that the dedication day of the new temple was July 23, the day of the old Neptune festival.
It was, on the contrary, the building of a sanctuary of the league outside the pomerium, yet inside the civil wall; not the adoption of Diana as a Roman goddess, but the close association of the Diana of the Latin league with Rome. It was the attempt to put Rome religiously as well as politically into the position which Aricia held; and it was successful.
Word Of The Day