September.

The chief feasts in this month were the games (Ludi Magni or Romani) in honor of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

October.

  13. Fontinalia.  Feast of fountains, when the springs were strewed
        with flowers.
  15.  Sacrifice of a horse to Mars.

The feasts in November are unimportant.

December.

   5. Faunalia, in honor of Faunus.
  19. Saturnalia, sacred to Saturn.  A Roman thanksgiving for the
        harvest.  It lasted seven days, during which the slaves had their
        liberty, in memory of the age of Saturn, when all were equal.  The
        rich kept open table to all comers, and themselves waited on the
        slaves.  Presents were interchanged, schools were closed.  The Senate
        did not sit.

Thus religion everywhere met the public life of the Roman by its festivals, and laid an equal yoke on his private life by its requisition of sacrifices, prayers, and auguries.  All pursuits must be conducted according to a system, carefully laid down by the College of Pontiffs.  Sacrifices and prayers of one or another kind were demanded during most of the occasions of life.  Hidden in our word “inaugurate” is the record of the fact that nothing could be properly begun without the assistance of the augurs.  Sacrifices of lustration and expiation were very common, not so much for moral offences as for ceremonial mistakes.  The doctrine of the opus operatum was supreme in Roman religion.  The intention was of little importance; the question was whether the ceremony had been performed exactly in accordance with rule.  If not, it must be done again.  Sometimes fifty or a hundred victims were killed before the priestly etiquette was contented.  Sometimes magistrates must resign because the college of augurs suspected some informality in the ceremonies of their election.  Laws were annulled and judicial proceedings revoked for the same reason.  If the augurs declared the signs unfavorable, a public meeting must be adjourned and no business done.  A single mistake in the form of a prayer would make it ineffectual.  If a man went out to walk, there was a form to be recited; if he mounted his chariot, another.  All these religious acts were of the nature of charms, which acted on the gods by an inherent power, and compelled them to be favorable, whatever their own wishes might be.  The gods were, therefore, as much the slaves of external mechanical laws as the Romans themselves.  In reality, the supreme god of Rome was law, in the form of rule.  But these rules afterward expanded, as the Roman civilization increased, into a more generous jurisprudence.  Regularity broadened into justice.[289] But for a long period the whole of the Roman organic law was a system of hard external method.  And the rise of law as justice and reason was the decline of religion as mere prescription and rule.  This one change is the key to the dissolution of the Roman system of religious practices.