NOTES. 



237 



nected with physical phenomena must have lost 

 all interest with the people, if they were cele- 

 brated sometimes at one season, and sometimes at 

 another. On the banks of the Nile^» as well as 

 those of the Tiber, distinctions were doubtless made 

 between the festivals attached to the date of a month 

 (ferite stativce), and those announced by the priests 

 at the periods pointed out by the motives of their 

 institution. These latter festivals were named among 

 the Romans feria conceptiva ; and a distinction was 

 made between the sementiva, the paganalia, and the 

 compitalia (Marini, Atti de Fratelli Arvali, torn. 1, 

 p. 126). In Egypt, the festival of Thoth, which shared 

 with the month of this name the whole of the sea- 

 sons during the sothic period, did not probably coin- 

 cide with a festival celebrated in honour of the helia- 

 cal rising of Sirius. Is it likely, that processions, in 

 which the emblems of water were the most prominent, 

 took place in times of the greatest drought ? The 

 passage of Geminus, it is tfue, is i very explicit : 



Bot'Aovra* yag (o; 'AtytWrt©*) rug Bvaitxt; roig ©eo*$ [avj kxtu 

 rov avTov zcc^ov rov hiuvrov yUeaQcc? aMa &to6 irucruv ruv rov 

 ivtocvrov a%vv heXQhv, kui yivsaQoci rw $£fiv»j\ iogryv, xoti XPPHtyW' 



xa) ^SivoTr^vflv, hu\ lo-pvjv (Elem. Astronom. cap. 6). 



Geminus of Rhodes, who lived in the time of Sylla 

 and Cicero, censures Eudoxus, and the Greeks in ge- 

 neral, for having supposed, that the feast of Isis cor- 

 responded constantly to the winter solstice; while, ac- 

 cording to the vague year, it must have run through 

 thirty days in the space of a hundred and twenty 

 years. But if it were admitted, that all the festivals, 

 which correspond to the seasons and the astrono- 

 mical phenomena, were attached to the dates of the 

 months of Phamenoth, Paction, or Mechir, what be- 



