Terga ferant volpes, causa docenda mihi est.
He tells a charming story to explain the custom, learnt from an old man of Carseoli, an Aequian town, where he was seeking information while writing the Fasti. A boy of twelve years’ old caught a vixen fox which had done damage to the farm, and tied it up in straw and hay. This he set on fire, but the fox escaped and burnt the crops. Hence a law at Carseoli forbidding—something about foxes, which the corruption of the MSS. has obscured for us[[250]]. Then he concludes:
Utque luat poenas gens haec, Cerialibus ardet;
Quoque modo segetes perdidit, ipsa perit.
We are, of course, reminded of Samson burning the corn of the Philistines[[251]]; and it is probable that the story in each case is a myth explanatory of some old practice like the one Ovid describes at Rome. But what the practice meant it is not very easy to see. Preller has his explanation ready[[252]]; it was a ‘sinnbildliche Erinnerung’ of the robigo (i. e. ‘red fox’), which was to be feared and guarded against at this time of year. Mannhardt thinks rather of the corn-foxes or corn-spirits of France and Germany, of which he gives many instances[[253]]. If the foxes were corn spirits, one does not quite see why they should have brands fastened to their tails[[254]]. No exactly parallel practice seems to be forthcoming, and the fox does not appear elsewhere in ancient Italian or Greek folk-tales, as far as I can discover. All that can be said is that the fox’s tail seems to have been an object of interest, and possibly to have had some fertilizing power[[255]], and some curious relation to ears of corn. Prof. Gubernatis believes this tail to have been a phallic symbol[[256]]. We need not accept his explanation, but we may be grateful to him for a modern Italian folk-tale, from the region of Leghorn and the Maremma, in which a fox is frightened away by chickens which carry each in its beak an ear of millet; the fox is told that these ears are all foxes’ tails, and runs for it.
Here we must leave this puzzle[[257]]; but whoever cares to read Ovid’s lines about his journey towards his native Pelignian country, his turning into the familiar lodging—
Hospitis antiqui solitas intravimus aedes,
and the tales he heard there—among them that of the fox—will find them better worth reading than the greater part of the Fasti.
xi Kal. Mai. (Apr. 21). NP.[[258]]
PAR[ILIA]. (CAER. MAFF. PRAEN.)