RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS IN ANCIENT ROME
Each spring, towns and villages possessing the right to take part the Romans later knew of thirty shared common sacrifices and banquets on the Alban Mount, the supposed site of Alba Longa. The Latin festival survived the end of the political independence of the Latin communities in the fourth cen¬tury, because Roman officials continued to supervise its performance for centuries thereafter. The Latins also possessed common cults at other sites.
At Lavinium, a group of Latin cities, probably thirteen in number, sacrificed at a shrine to the Penates, or household gods; centuries later, when Rome had taken over the shrine, Roman officials still performed rites there to the Penates of the Roman People. Another cluster of cities, towns, and villages shared worship in the grove of the goddess Diana at Aricia, and there may have been further groups that made common use of sacred groves near Tusculum and Ardea. The Roman king, Servius Tullius, allegedly established another shrine to Diana on the Aventine hill, just outside the limits of the city of Rome, for all the Latins to use.
These sanctuaries and the rites that took place in them are certainly old, although the date of their first appearance is unknown. At two of the sites, prominent cult structures appeared in the sixth century, at just the time when cities were also first building temples to their own gods. At Lavinium, archeologists have found the sanctuary of the Penates just outside the city’s fortifications. In it, beginning in the sixth century, were built thirteen monumental altars, each of which probably belonged to one of the cities that sacrificed there. Later representations of the cult statue of Diana on the Aventine, which would have been housed in her temple there, show it to have been of a sixth century type. Temples built within cities during the sixth and fifth centuries often occupied the sites of open-air sanctuar¬ies at which cult activity would date much further back. The same may well be true of the interurban sanctuaries at Rome, Lavinium, and other places
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