flaminica. If this were so, then both he and the king, whom to some extent at least he represented, would be living under mother-right.
But both parties in this controversy seem to have missed the essential fact, that the great cult of Iuppiter was not carried out either by flamen or by flaminica, but by both together, aided by the camilli and camillae, who no doubt represented their children. In other words, like most of the public cult of Rome, it was an enlargement of family worship. To the service of the greatest of the gods was assigned an ideal family, wherein the husband, himself previously unmarried, had taken to wife in the most solemn fashion a virgin, and the husband and wife were aided in their worship by children into whose homes death had not entered, and further protected by their own elaborate observance of all imaginable tabus, many of which the average citizen could not possibly comply with. If the flaminica died, this ideal household ceased to exist, nor could it be reconstructed; for the festivals of Iuppiter, not to mention other rites which required the flamen's presence, came every month, and magico-religious reasons, to say nothing of common decency, prevented his finding another wife so soon; and apart from this, a family consisting of a widower remarried and his wife and children, is no longer an ideal family, such as this cult required. That the death of the flamen equally put an end to the arrangement is a point which has been somewhat overlooked.[1]
Mention must be made of another point on which no commentator has yet thrown any light. In the ceremonial of Mater Matuta[2] the women who took part might not pray for blessings on their own children but on those of
