Here we must leave this puzzle[257]; but whoever cares to read Ovid’s lines about his journey towards his native Pelignian country, his turning into the familiar lodging—
Hospitis antiqui solitas intravimus aedes,
and the tales he heard there—among them that of the fox—will find them better worth reading than the greater part of the _Fasti_.
ROMA COND[ITA] FERIAE CORONATIS OM[NIBUS]. (CAER.)
N[ATALIS] URBIS. CIRCENSES MISSUS XXIV. (PHILOC.)
[A note in Praen. is hopelessly mutilated, with the exception of the words IGNES and PRINCIPIO AN[NI PASTORICII[259]?]]
The Parilia[260], at once one of the oldest and best attested festivals of the whole year, is at the same time the one whose features have been most clearly explained by the investigations of parallels among other races.
The first point to notice is that the festival was both public and private, urban and rustic[261]. Ovid clearly distinguishes the two; lines 721-734 deal with the urban festival, 735-782 with the rustic. The explanations which follow deal with both. Pales, the deity (apparently both masculine and feminine[262]) whose name the festival bears, was, like Faunus, a common deity of Italian pasture land. A Palatium was said by Varro to have been named after Pales at Reate, in the heart of the Sabine hill-country[263]; and though this may not go for much, the character of the Parilia, and the fact that Pales is called _rusticola_, _pastoricia_, _silvicola_, &c., are sufficient to show the original non-urban character of the deity. He (or she) was a shepherd’s deity of the simplest kind, and survived in Rome as little more than a name[264] from the oldest times, when the earliest invaders drove their cattle through the Sabine mountains. Here, then, we seem to have a clear example of a rite which was originally a rustic one, and survived as such, while at the same time one local form of it was kept up in the great city, and had become entangled with legend and probably altered in some points of ritual. We will take the rustic form first.
Here we may distinguish in Ovid’s account[265] the following ritualistic acts.
1. The sheep-fold[266] was decked with green boughs and a great wreath was hung on the gate:
Frondibus et fixis decorentur ovilia ramis, Et tegat ornatas longa corona fores.