Robigus[[311]] is the spirit who works in the mildew; and it has been conjectured that he was a form or indigitation of Mars[[312]], since Tertullian tells us that ‘Marti et Robigini Numa ludos instituit’[[313]]. This is quite consistent with all we know of the Mars of the farm-worship, who is invoked to avert evil simply because he can be the creator of it[[314]]. The same feature is found in the worship of Apollo, who had at Rhodes the cult-title ἐρυθίβιος[[315]], or Apollo of the blight, as elsewhere he is Apollo Smintheus, i. e. the power that can bring and also avert the pest of field-mice.
Robigus had a grove of his own at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia; and Ovid relates in pretty verses how, as he was returning from Nomentum (doubtless by way of his own gardens, which were at the junction of the Via Claudia with the Via Flaminia near the Milvian bridge[[316]]), he met the Flamen Quirinalis with the exta of a dog and a sheep to offer to the god[[317]]. He joined the procession, which was apparently something quite new to him, and witnessed the ceremony, noting the meri patera, the turis acerra, and the rough linen napkin[[318]], at the priest’s right hand. He versified the prayer which he heard, and which is not unlike that which Cato directs the husbandman to address to Mars in the lustration of the farm[[319]]:
Aspera Robigo, parcas Cerialibus herbis,
Et tremat in summa leve cacumen humo.
Tu sata sideribus caeli nutrita secundi
Crescere, dum fiant falcibus apta, sinas.
Parce, precor, scabrasque manus a messibus aufer,
Neve noce cultis: posse nocere sat est, &c.
Ovid then asked the flamen why a dog—nova victima—was sacrificed, and was told that the dangerous Dog-star was in the ascendant[[320]]:
Est Canis, Icarium dicunt, quo sidere moto