Note 211 — Chapter II · TABOOED DAYS AFTER A DEATH AND ON RELATED OCCASIONS

Festus, De verborum significatione, ed. C. O. Müller, Leipzig, 1839, p. 156; Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 16, 24. The dies religiosi were sometimes confused, even by the ancients, with the dies nefasti (compare Gellius, Noctes Atticæ, iv, 9, 5), which were days marked in the calendar as occasions when the prætor’s court was not open and assemblies (comitia) could not lawfully meet. But not all dies religiosi were observed as non-comitial and non-judicial days. It seems, indeed, that the priestly authorities who drew up the calendar did not wish to recognize these products of popular superstition by incorporating all of them, under the guise of dies nefasti, in the Roman state religion. On the dies religiosi, also described as dies atri or dies vitiosi, see G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, Munich, 1902, pp. 376 sq.; W. W. Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People, London, 1911, pp. 38 sqq.; T. Mommsen, in Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, i, pt. i,² 296.