Rest Days; A Sociological Study 41 



sheep for health's sake in the stream."'^® Such interpretations 

 indicate that in late classical antiquity the burdens of the old 

 tabooed days were being gradually lifted and their observance 

 adjusted to the social and economic needs of a progressive 

 community. 



These old Roman festivals, kept so scrupulously in the earlier 

 epoch, are further significant since they present the closest 

 classical analogy to the periods of abstinence which we have 

 previously met in the modern savage world (supra). The 

 celebration of a ferial day, to the Roman as to the Naga of 

 Assam, formed the most appropriate way of confronting a crisis. 

 The man who had blasphemed and so incurred the divine anger 

 ought to placate the outraged deity by celebrating a private 

 festival. One who had pronounced by accident the names of 

 certain mysterious divinities resorted to a similar procedure 

 (fcrias observabat). The Flaminica or wife of the Flamen 

 Dialis was invested, like her husband, with a network of taboos: 

 if she heard thunder she became tabooed — fcriata — until the cele- 

 bration of an expiatory sacrifice (donee placasset deos)}^ Cer- 

 tain natural phenomena resulted in the cessation of all public 

 activity by the people at large and the institution of extraordinary 

 festivals. A rain of stones from heaven, accompanied by 

 lightning, provoked a nine-days' festival in the time of Hannibal's 

 invasion of Italy ; two and a half centuries later, the emperor 

 Claudius, when an earthquake happened at Rome, never failed to 

 " appoint holidays for sacred rites. "-° Such examples, which by 

 no means exhaust the subject, may nevertheless suffice to show 

 how in ancient Rome the fcriac were ceremonies to appease the 

 supernatural powers ; and how the times of their celebration were 

 originally periods of gloom and not of joy. That subsequently, 



^^ Gcorgica, i. 268-72. Cf. Cato's injunctions: "On holidays, old ditche; 

 could have been repaired, the public roads paved, bramble-bushes cut 

 down, . . . everything made neat and clean" (Dc re nistica. 2). 



" IMacrobius, i. 16, 8. On the taboos affecting the Flamen and Flaminica 

 see F. B. Jevons, Plutarch's Romane Questions, London, 1892, p. Ixxiii 

 sqq.: Frazer, The Golden Bough,' i. 241 sq. 



^' Livy, XXV. 7 ; Suetonius, Claudius, 22. 



41 



