Non. Sext. (Aug. 5). F. (NP. ant.)
SALUTI IN COLLE QUIRINALE SACRIFICIUM PUBLICUM. (VALL.)
SALUTI IN COLLE. (AMIT. ANT.)
NATALIS SALUTIS. (PHILOC.)
The date of the foundation of the temple of Salus was 302 B.C., during the Samnite wars[[792]]. The cult was probably not wholly new. The Augurium Salutis, which we know through its revival by Augustus, was an ancient religious performance at the beginning of each year, or at the accession of new consuls, which involved, first the ascertaining whether prayers would be acceptable to the gods, and secondly the offering of such prayers on an auspicious day[[793]]. Two very old inscriptions also suggest that the cult was well distributed in Italy at an early period[[794]]. Such impersonations of abstract ideas as Salus, Concordia, Pax, Spes, &c., do not belong to the oldest stage of religion, but were no doubt of pontifical origin, i. e. belonged to the later monarchy or early republic[[795]]. We need not suppose that they were due to the importation of Greek cults and ideas, though in some cases they became eventually overlaid with these. They were generated by the same process as the gods of the Indigitamenta[[796]]—being in fact an application to the life of the state of that peculiarly Roman type of religious thought which conceived a distinct numen as presiding over every act and suffering of the individual. This again, as I believe, in its product the Indigitamenta, was an artificial priestly exaggeration of a very primitive tendency to see a world of nameless spirits surrounding and influencing all human life.
The history of the temple is interesting[[797]]. Not long after its dedication its walls were painted by Gaius Fabius, consul in 269 B.C., whose descendants, among them the historian, bore the name of Pictor, in commemoration of a feat so singular for a Roman of that age[[798]]. It was struck by lightning no less than four times, and burnt down in the reign of Claudius. Livy[[799]] tells us that in 180 B.C., by order of the decemviri a supplicatio was held, in consequence of a severe pestilence, in honour of Apollo, Aesculapius, and Salus; which shows plainly that the goddess was already being transformed into the likeness of the Greek ῾Υγίεια, and associated rather with public health than with public wealth in the most general sense of the word.