[583] The great authority of the Pont. Max. is well shown in the story of Tremellius the praetor, who in the middle of the second century B.C. was fined (by a tribune?) "quod cum M. Aemilio pontifice maximo iniuriose contenderat, sacrorumque quam magistratuum ius potentius fuit." Livy, Epit. 47.
[584] De aedibus sacris populi Romani, p. 10 foll.
[585] Aust, op. cit. p. 14 foll. See also R.F. p. 340 foll.
[586] For Vacuna, Wissowa, R.K. pp. 44 and 128. She was later, but probably without good reason, identified with Victoria. The conjecture that she was a hearth deity rests on the lines of Ovid, Fasti, vi. 305, which I have before referred to in another context:
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos. nunc quoque cum fiunt antiquae sacra Vacunae, ante Vacunales stantque sedentque focos.
[587] Aust, p. 14. For Vertumnus the locus classicus is Propert. v. 2. It is not certain that the connection with gardens was primitive.
[588] R.F. p. 341.
[589] R.F. p. 341.
[590] See Axtell, The Deification of Abstract Ideas in Roman Literature and Inscriptions (Chicago, 1907), p. 59 foll., where the views of Mommsen, Boissier, Marquardt, and Wissowa are discussed. Axtell's own conclusion is given on p. 62 foll. In the main it seems to agree with that hazarded in my Roman Festivals, p. 190.
[591] For the evidence as to the contents of the commentarii, which are now generally identified with the libri, see Wissowa, R.K. 32 and 441; Schanz, op. cit. i. 32; and the article "Commentarii" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. As Wissowa remarks (p. 441, note 6), we are greatly in need of a complete collection of all fragments of these archives.