Note 6 — Chapter II

were probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual chants of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni were the woodland gods of Italy, and were, besides their other functions, supposed to be endowed with prophetic power6. The word Vates, till the Augustan age, meant not a poet but a soothsayer. The Camenae or Casmenae (another form of which word appears in Carmenta, the prophetic mother of Evander) were worshipped, not as the inspirers of poetry, but as the foretellers of future events7. Both Greeks and Romans sought to obtain a knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation of omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be divinely endowed with foresight. But the Greeks, even in the regard which they paid to auguries and oracles, were influenced, for the most part, by their lively imagination; while the Romans, from the earliest to the latest eras of their history, in all their relations to the supernatural world, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative ceremonialism. The notices in Latin literature of the functions of these early Vates—as, for instance, the counsel of the Etrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake during the war with Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during the Second Punic War,