XX.
THE ROMAN REPUBLICANS SERIOUS AND GAY.
It is easier to think of the old Roman republicans as serious than gay,
when we remember that they considered that their very commonwealth was
established upon the will of the gods, and that no acts--at least no
public acts--could properly be performed without consulting those
spiritual beings, which their imagination pictured as presiding over
the hearth, the farm, the forum--as swarming throughout every
department of nature. The first stone was not laid at the foundation of
the city until Romulus and Remus had gazed up into the heavens, so
mysterious and so beautiful, and had obtained, as they thought, some
indication of the fittest place where they might dig and build. The
she-wolf that nurtured the twins was elevated into a divinity with the
name Lupa, or Luperca (_lupus_, a wolf), and was made the wife of
a god who was called Lupercus, and worshipped as the protector of sheep
against their enemies, and as the god of fertility. On the fifteenth of
February, when in that warm clime spring was beginning to open the
buds, the shepherds celebrated a feast in honor of Lupercus. Its
ceremonies, in some part symbolic of purification, were rude and almost
savage, proving that they originated in remote antiquity, but they
continued at least down to the end of the period we have considered,
and the powerful Marc Antony did not disdain to clothe himself in a
wolfskin and run almost naked through the crowded streets of the
capital the month before his friend Julius C?sar was murdered.
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