Obviously this was a much more convenient and popular arrangement than to have your holidays scattered about over the whole year as single days; and it suited the rich and ambitious, who sought to obtain popular favour by shows and games on a grand scale, needing a succession of several days for complete exhibition.

So the old religious word feriae becomes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amusement, by the word _ludi_, and came at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the holidays of schoolboys.[460] These ludi will form the chief subject of this chapter; but we must first mention one or two of the old feriae which seem always to have remained occasions of holiday-making, at any rate for the lower classes of the population.
One of these occurred on the Ides of March, and must have been going on at the moment when Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.It was the festival of Anna Perenna, a mysterious old deity of "the ring of the year." The lower class of the population, Ovid tells us,[461] streamed out to the "festum geniale" of Anna, and spent the whole day in the Campus Martius, lying about in pairs of men and women, indulging in drinking and all kinds of revelry.

Some lay in the open; some constructed tents, or rude huts of boughs, stretching their togas over them for shelter.

As they drank they prayed for as many years of life as they could swallow cups of wine.

The usual characteristics of the Italian _festa_ were to be found there: they sang anything they had picked up in the theatre, with much gesticulation ("et iactant faciles ad sua verba manus"), and they danced, the women letting down their long hair.