OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
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to a secret project of reviving the ancient worship of the gods.[1] These idols were crumbled into dust, and the mythology which had once been the creed of nations was so universally disbelieved that it might be employed without scandal, or at least without suspicion, by Christian poets.[2] Yet the vestiges of superstition were not absolutely obliterated, and the festival of the Lupercalia, whose origin had preceded the foundation of Rome, was still celebrated under the reign of Anthemius. The savage and simple rites were expressive of an early state of society before the invention of arts and agriculture. The rustic deities who presided over the toils and pleasures of the pastoral life. Pan, Fannus, and their train of satyrs, were such as the fancy of shepherds might create, sportive, petulant, and lascivious; whose power was limited, and whose malice was inoffensive. A goat was the offering the best adapted to their character and attributes; the flesh of the victim was roasted on willow spits; and the riotous youths who crowded to the feast ran naked about the fields, with leather thongs in their hands, communicating, as it was supposed, the blessing of fecundity to the women whom they touched.[3] The altar of Pan was erected, perhaps by Evander the Arcadian, in a dark recess in the side of the Palatine hill, watered by a perpetual fountain, and shaded by an hanging grove. A tradition that, in the same place, Romulus and Remus were suckled by the wolf rendered it still more sacred and venerable in the eyes of the Romans; and this sylvan spot was gradually surrounded by the stately edifices of the Forum.[4] After the conversion of the Imperial city, the Christians still continued, in the month of February, the annual celebration of the Lupercalia; to which they ascribed a secret and mysterious influence on the genial powers of the animal and vegetable world. The bishops of Rome were solicitous to
- ↑ Damascius, in the life of the philosopher Isidore, apud Photium, p. 1049 [340]. Damascius, who lived under Justinian, composed another work, consisting of 570 præternatural stories of souls, dæmons, apparitions, the dotage of Platonic Paganism.
- ↑ In the poetical works of Sidonius, which he afterwards condemned (l. ix. epist. 16, p. 285), the fabulous deities are the principal actors. If Jerom was scourged by the angels for only reading Virgil, the bishop of Clermont, for such a vile imitation, deserved an additional whipping from the Muses.
- ↑ Ovid (Fast. l. ii. 267-452) has given an amusing description of the follies of antiquity, which still inspired so much respect that a grave magistrate, running naked through the streets, was not an object of astonishment or laughter.
- ↑ See Dionys. Halicarn. l. i. p. 25, 65, edit. Hudson [79]. The Roman antiquaries, Donatus (l. ii. c. 18, p. 173, 174) and Nardini (p. 386, 387), have laboured to ascertain the true situation of the Lupercal.
