As the city grew, these old agricultural festivities lost of course much of their native simplicity and naivete; some of them survived merely as religious or priestly performances, some became degraded into licentious enjoyment; but the music and dancing, the gay dresses, the racing, the mumming or acting, are all to be found in the city, developed in one form or another, from the earliest to the latest periods of Roman history.
The Latin word for a holiday was _feriae_, a term which belongs to the language of religious law (_ius divinum_).

Strictly speaking, it means a day which the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to the service of the gods.[455] As of old on the farm no work was to be done on such days, so in the city no public business could be transacted.
Cicero, drawing up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum, writes thus of feriae: "Feriis iurgia amovento, easque in familiis, operibus patratis, habento": which he afterwards explains as meaning that the citizen must abstain from litigation, and the slave be excused from labour.[456] The idea then of a holiday was much the same as we find expressed in the Jewish Sabbath, and had its root also in religious observance.

But Cicero, whether he is actually reproducing the words of an old law or inventing it for himself, was certainly not reflecting the custom of the city in his own day; no such rigid observance of a rule was possible in the capital of an Empire such as the Roman had become.

Even on the farm it had long ago been found necessary to make exceptions; thus Virgil tells us:[457] "Quippe etiam festis quaedam exercere diebus Fas et iura sinunt: rivos deducere nulla Religio vetuit, segeti praetendere saepem, Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres, Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri." So too in the city it was simply impossible that all work should cease on feriae, of which there were more than a hundred in the year, including the Ides of every month and some of the Kalends and Nones.
As a matter of fact a double change had come about since the city and its dominion began to increase rapidly about the time of the Punic wars.

First, many of the old festivals, sacred to deities whose vogue was on the wane, or who had no longer any meaning for a city population, as being deities of husbandry, were almost entirely neglected: even if the priests performed the prescribed rites, no one knew and no one cared,[458] and it may be doubted whether the State was at all scrupulous in adhering to the old sacred rules as to the hours on which business could be transacted on such days.[459] Secondly, certain festivals which retained their popularity had been extended from one day to three or more, in one or two cases, as we shall see, even to thirteen and fifteen days, in order to give time for an elaborate system of public amusement consisting of chariot-races and stage-plays, and known by the name of _ludi_, or, as at the winter Saturnalia, to enable all classes to enjoy themselves during the short days for seven mornings instead of one.