The Latin word for a holiday was feriae, a term which belongs to the language of religious law (ius divinum).  Strictly speaking, it means a day which the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to the service of the gods.[455] As of old on the farm no work was to be done on such days, so in the city no public business could be transacted.  Cicero, drawing up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum, writes thus of feriae:  “Feriis iurgia amovento, easque in familiis, operibus patratis, habento”:  which he afterwards explains as meaning that the citizen must abstain from litigation, and the slave be excused from labour.[456] The idea then of a holiday was much the same as we find expressed in the Jewish Sabbath, and had its root also in religious observance.  But Cicero, whether he is actually reproducing the words of an old law or inventing it for himself, was certainly not reflecting the custom of the city in his own day; no such rigid observance of a rule was possible in the capital of an Empire such as the Roman had become.  Even on the farm it had long ago been found necessary to make exceptions; thus Virgil tells us:[457]

  “Quippe etiam festis quaedam exercere diebus
  Fas et iura sinunt:  rivos deducere nulla
  Religio vetuit, segeti praetendere saepem,
  Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres,
  Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri.”

So too in the city it was simply impossible that all work should cease on feriae, of which there were more than a hundred in the year, including the Ides of every month and some of the Kalends and Nones.  As a matter of fact a double change had come about since the city and its dominion began to increase rapidly about the time of the Punic wars.  First, many of the old festivals, sacred to deities whose vogue was on the wane, or who had no longer any meaning for a city population, as being deities of husbandry, were almost entirely neglected:  even if the priests performed the prescribed rites, no one knew and no one cared,[458] and it may be doubted whether the State was at all scrupulous in adhering to the old sacred rules as to the hours on which business could be transacted on such days.[459] Secondly, certain festivals which retained their popularity had been extended from one day to three or more, in one or two cases, as we shall see, even to thirteen and fifteen days, in order to give time for an elaborate system of public amusement consisting of chariot-races and stage-plays, and known by the name of ludi, or, as at the winter Saturnalia, to enable all classes to enjoy themselves during the short days for seven mornings instead of one.  Obviously this was a much more convenient and popular arrangement than to have your holidays scattered about over the whole year as single days; and it suited the rich and ambitious, who sought to obtain popular favour by shows and games on a grand scale, needing a succession of several days for complete exhibition.  So the old religious word feriae becomes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amusement, by the word ludi, and came at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the holidays of schoolboys.[460] These ludi will form the chief subject of this chapter; but we must first mention one or two of the old feriae which seem always to have remained occasions of holiday-making, at any rate for the lower classes of the population.