x Kal. Iun. (May 23). NP.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Fowler, W. Warde (William Warde)
TUBIL[USTRIUM]. (ESQ. CAER. VEN. MAFF.)
FER[IAE] VOLCANO. (VEN. AMIT.)
I have already explained[483] the view taken by Mommsen of the two pairs of days, March 23 and 24 and May 23 and 24, accepting his theory that the 24th in each month was the day on which wills could be made and witnessed in the Comitia calata, and that the 23rd in each month was the day on which the tubae were lustrated by which the assembly was summoned.
But May 23 is also marked in two calendars as feriae Volcano; and Ovid has noticed this in a single couplet:[484]
Proxima Volcani lux est: Tubilustria dicunt;
Lustrantur purae, quas facit ille, tubae.
The difficult question of the original character of Volcanus must be postponed until we come to his festival in August. We only need here to ask whether Ovid was right in regarding Volcanus as the smith who made the trumpets. This has been strenuously denied by Wissowa[485], who goes so far as to believe that the deity originally invoked on this day was not Volcanus but Mars—since the corresponding day in March was a festival of that deity—and that Volcanus was at an early period thrust into his place under the influence of Greek notions of Hephaestus as a smith who made armour and also trumpets. Wissowa has, however, to throw over the two calendars quoted above (Ven. Amit.) in order to support his argument—and so far we are hardly entitled to go.
It is safer to take Volcanus as an ancient Roman deity whose cult was closely connected with that of Maia, or the Bona Dea, and was prominent in this month as well as in August. The Flamen Volcanalis sacrificed to the Bona Dea on May 1; and Maia was addressed in invocations as Maia Volcani[486]. The coincidence of this festival of his with the Tubilustrium I take to have been accidental; but it led naturally, as the Romans became acquainted with Greek mythology, to the erroneous view represented by Ovid that Volcanus was himself a smith[487].