It would perhaps have been wiser not to go so far as this. He has already carried us back to a world of ideas older than these varying names which so often bewilder us in the Roman worship—to a world of spirits, Semones, Lares, Cerri, ghosts of deceased ancestors, vegetation demons, and men’s ‘other souls.’ When he talks of a _Genius Iovis_[588], he is surely using the language of later polytheism to express an idea which belonged, not to a polytheistic age, but to that older world of religious thought. He is doing, in fact, the very thing which the Romans themselves were doing all through the period of the Republic—the one thing which above all others has made the study of their religious ideas such a treacherous quagmire for the modern student.
MENTI IN CAPITOLIO. (VEN. MAFF. VI MINORES.)
The temple of Mens was vowed by T. Otacilius (praetor) in 217 B.C., after the battle of Trasimenus ‘propter neglegentiam caerimoniarum auspiciorumque[589],’ and dedicated in 215 B.C., by the same man as _duumvir aedibus dedicandis_[590]. The vow was the result of an inspection of the Sibylline books, from which we might infer that the goddess was a stranger[591]. If so, who was she, and whence? Reasoning from the fact that in the same year, in the same place, and by the same man, a temple was dedicated to Venus Erycina[592], Preller guessed that this Mens was not a mere abstraction, but another form of the same Venus; for a Venus Mimnermia or Meminia is mentioned by Servius[593], ‘quod meminerit omnium.’
However this may be, the foundation of a cult of Mens at so critical a moment of their fortunes is very characteristic of the Roman spirit of that age; it was an appeal to ‘something not themselves which made for righteousness’ to help them to remember their caerimoniae, and not to neglect their auspicia. It is remarkable that this temple of Mens was restored by M. Aemilius Scaurus probably amid the disasters of the Cimbrian war a century later[594].
XVII KAL. QUINCT. (JUNE 15). Q. ST. D. F.
It would seem from these notes in the calendars, and from passages in Ovid and Festus[595], that both before and after the day of the true Vestalia there were days set apart for the cult of the goddess, which were _nefasti_ and also _religiosi_[596]. Ovid’s lines are worth quoting; he consults the Flaminica Dialis[597] about the marriage of his daughter: