Lydus tells us that on the Ides of March (a mistake, it is supposed[110], for the 14th—which, however, he should not have made), a man clothed in skins was led out and driven with long peeled wands (out of the city, as we may guess from what follows) and shouted at as ‘Mamurius.’ Hence the saying, when any one is beaten, that they are ‘playing Mamurius with him.’ For the legend runs that Mamurius the smith was beaten out of the city because misfortune fell on the Romans when they substituted the new shields (made by Mamurius) for those that had fallen from heaven[111].
This is clearly a late form of the Mamurius-myth: in all the earlier accounts[112] only one ancile is said to have fallen from heaven. Lydus seems rather to be thinking of twelve original ones[113], and twelve copies—perhaps of the Palatine and Colline ancilia respectively. If the form of the myth, then, is of late growth, suspicion may well be aroused as to the antiquity of the rite it was meant to explain, for with the older type of myth the rite does not seem to suit. And this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that in the whole of Latin literature there is no certain allusion to a rite so striking and peculiar, and only one that can possibly, even by forcible treatment, be taken as such. In Propertius v (iv.) 2. 61, we have the following lines, put into the mouth of the god Vertumnus:
At tibi, Mamuri, formae caelator aenae, Tellus artifices ne premat Osca manus, Qui me tam docilis potuisti fundere in usus. Unum opus est: operi non datur unus honos.
Usener took this to mean, or to imply, that Mamurius was driven out of the city to its enemies the Oscans; but how we are to get this out of the words, which will bear very different interpretations, obscure as they are, it is not easy to see. And can we easily believe that, with this exception, no allusion should be found to the rite in either Latin or Greek writers—not in Ovid, Dionysius, Servius, Plutarch[114], or in the fragments of Varro, Varrius, and others—if that curious rite had really been enacted year by year before the eyes of the Roman people? It certainly is not impossible that it may have slipped their notice, or have been mentioned in works that are lost to us; but it is so improbable as to justify us in hesitating to base conclusions as to the antiquity of the rite on the statement of Lydus alone.