XI. Kal. 21st
The night has gone, and Dawn comes up. I am called upon to sing of the Parilia, and not in vain shall be the call, if kindly Pales favours me. O kindly Pales, favour me when I sing of pastoral rites, if I pay my respects to thy festival. Sure it is that I have often brought with full hands the ashes of the calf and the beanstraws, chaste means of expiation. Sure it is that I have leaped over the flames ranged three in a row, and the moist laurel-bough has sprinkled water on me. The goddess is moved and favours the work I have in hand. My bark is launched; now fair winds fill my sails.
‘ Ye people, go fetch materials for fumigation from the Virgin’s altar. Vesta will give them; by Vesta’s gift ye shall be pure. The materials for fumigation will be the blood of a horse and the” ashes of a calf; the third thing will be the empty stalks of hard beans. Shepherd, do thou purify thy well-fed sheep at fall of twilight; first sprinkle the ground with water and sweep it with a broom. Deck the sheepfold with leaves and branches fastened to it; adorn the door and cover it with a long festoon. Make blue smoke with pure sulphur, and let the sheep, touched with the smoking sulphur, bleat. Burn wood of male olives and pine and savines, and let the singed laurel crackle in the midst of the hearth. And let a basket of millet accompany cakes of millet; the rural goddess particularly delights in that food. Add viands and a pail of milk, such as she loves; and when the viands have been cut up, pray to sylvan Pales, offering warm milk to her. Say, “O, take thought alike for the cattle and the cattle’s masters; ward off from my stalls all harm, O let it flee aw ay! If I have fed my sheep on holy ground, or sat me down under a sacred tree, and my sheep unwittingly have browsed on graves; if I have entered a forbidden grove, or the nymphs and the half-goat god have been put to flight at sight of me; if my pruning-knife has robbed a sacred copse of a shady bough, to fill a basket with leaves for a sick sheep, pardon my fault. Count it not against me if I have sheltered my flock in a rustic shrine till the hail left off, and may I not suffer for having troubled the pools: forgive it, nymphs, if the trampling of hoofs has made your waters turbid.
Do thou, goddess, appease for us the springs and their divinities; appease the gods dispersed through every grove. May we not see the Dryads, nor Diana’s baths, nor Faunus, when he Hes in the fields at noon. Drive far away diseases: may men and beasts be hale, and hale too the sagacious pack of watch-dogs. May I drive home my flocks as numerous as they were at morn, nor sigh as I bring back fleeces snatched from the wolf. Avert dire hunger. Let grass and leaves abound, and water both to wash and drink. Full udders may I milk; may my cheese bring me in money; may the sieve of wicker-work give passage to the liquid whey; lustful be the ram, and may his mate conceive and bear, and many a lamb be in my fold. And let the wool grow so soft that it could not fret the skin of girls nor chafe the tenderest hands. May my prayer be granted, and we will year by year make great cakes for Pales, the shepherds’ mistress.” With these things is the goddess to be propitiated; these words pronounce four times, facing the east, and wash thy hands in living dew. Then may est thou set a wooden bowl to serve as mixer, and mayest quaff the snow-white milk and purple must; anon leap with nimble foot and straining thews across the burning heaps of crackling straw.
“I have set forth the custom; it remains for me to tell its origin. The multitude of explanations creates a doubt and thwarts me at the outset. Devouring fire purges all things and melts the dross from out the metals; therefore it purges the shepherd and the sheep. Or are we to suppose that, because all things are composed of opposite principles, fire and water—those two discordant deities—therefore our fathers did conjoin these elements and thought meet to touch the body with fire and sprinkled water? Or did they deem these two important because they contain the source of life, the exile loses the use of them, and by them the bride is made a wife? Some suppose (though I can hardly do so) that the allusion is to Phaethon and Deucalion’s flood. Some people also say that when shepherds were knocking stones together, a spark suddenly leaped forth; the first indeed was lost, but the second was caught in straw; is that the reason of the flame at the Parilia? Or is the custom rather based on the piety of Aeneas, whom, even in the hour of defeat, the fire allowed to pass unscathed? Or is it haply nearer the truth that, when Rome was founded, orders were given to transfer the household gods to the new houses, and in changing homes the husbandmen set fire to their country houses and to the cottages they were about to abandon, and that they and their cattle leaped through the flames? Which happens even to the present time on the birthday of Rome.
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