Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The distribution of days in the known late republican calendars was obviously the outcome of different political and juridical practices; at least from the second century BCE onwards the regulation as a whole was attributed to the codifications of the mid-fifth century (Twelve tables). Religious traditions, too, were integrated: feriae, a special class of days given to the gods as property (and hence free from every mundane activity) were marked in a particular way; that is, as dies nefasti whose violation made piacular sacrifices necessary (marked by the letters NP and abbreviations of the festival names)....

