It is interesting to find the wheel symbol here again, as is noticed by Gaidoz in his Studies of Gallic Mythology[[662]]. We can hardly doubt that the Summanalia which Festus explains as ‘liba farinacea in modum rotae ficta[[663]]‘, were cakes offered or eaten on this day: it is hard to see what other connexion they could have had. Mr. Arthur Evans has some interesting remarks[[664]] on what seem to be moulds for making religious cakes of this kind, found at Tarentum; they are decorated, not only with the wheel or cross, but with many curious symbols. ‘It is characteristic,’ he writes, ‘in a whole class of religious cakes that they are impressed with a wheel or cross, and in other cases divided into segments as if to facilitate distribution. This symbolical division seems to connect itself with the worship of the ancestral fire rather than with any solar cult. In a modified form they are still familiar to us as “hot-cross buns.”’ Summanus, however, does not seem to have had anything to do with the ancestral fire.
viii Kal. Quinct. (June 24). C.
FORTI FORTUNAE TRANS TIBER[IM] AD MILLIAR[IUM] PRIM[UM] ET SEXT[UM]. (AMIT.)
FORTIS FORTUNAE. (VEN. PHILOC.)
SACRUM FORTIS FORTUNAE. (RUST.)
Ovid writes of this day as follows[[665]]:
Ite, deam laeti Fortem celebrate, Quirites!
In Tiberis ripa munera regis habet.
Pars pede, pars etiam celeri decurrite cymba,
Nec pudeat potos inde redire domum.