Plutarch discusses the meaning of these bucklers, called Ancilia, so it was said, from their curved form (ἀγκύλον). He suggests as alternative derivations, ἀνέκαθεν = from on high: or ἄκεσις = healing of sick: or αὐχμῶν λύσις = putting an end to drought: or ἀνάσχεσις = deliverance from calamities. But whatever the etymological significance, their ritual purpose would seem to have been to ward off the darts and arrows of pestilence, and the Salic ceremonial was dedicated to the honour of the sender. God he was not, for the religion of Numa’s Rome knew no gods of human form: these were a later importation from the anthropomorphic religion of Greece. He was some _numen_, some power less personal than a god, but more personal than a spirit. It was he that engendered pestilence by his evil machinations. The legend brings us back again close to the confines of imitative magic. True, it is not the agent of pestilence that is fashioned, not the brazen serpent, not the mice, not the emerods, but the agent of deliverance, ‘thy shield and buckler.’
In later years the Salii figure as colleges of priests, dedicated first to the worship of Mars, and later of Quirinus as well. The transformation served to obscure their true origin, which Plutarch asserts and which there is every reason to accept. Mars was not originally a god of war, but an agricultural god, and, like Apollo, a guardian of the crops. Coincidently with the transformation the ritual assumed a more martial character, the Salii performing the war-dance in full fighting panoply, as the procession moved through the city twice a year, in March and October. The beginning and end of the season of pestilence had faded insensibly into the beginning and end of the campaigning season. Horace[57] recounts the aldermanic magnificence of their festive repast.
The hymn of the Salii was written in archaic Saturnian verse, fragments of which have come down to us. Quintilian[58] says that, by the first century B.C. the primitive language, passed down with verbal exactitude from generation to generation, had become unintelligible to those who ceremoniously recited it. One fragment is instructive in its significance:
Cumé tonas, Leucésie, prae tet tremonti, Quom tibei cunei dextumúm tonárent.