exempt from the offices of the commoner gods._
The following gods, certainly, Varro signalizes as select, devoting
one book to this subject: Janus, Jupiter, Saturn, Genius, Mercury,
Apollo, Mars, Vulcan, Neptune, Sol, Orcus, father Liber, Tellus,
Ceres, Juno, Luna, Diana, Minerva, Venus, Vesta; of which twenty
gods, twelve are males, and eight females. Whether are these deities
called select, because of their higher spheres of administration in
the world, or because they have become better known to the people,
and more worship has been expended on them? If it be on account of
the greater works which are performed by them in the world, we ought
not to have found them among that, as it were, plebeian crowd of
deities, which has assigned to it the charge of minute and trifling
things. For, first of all, at the conception of a fœtus, from which
point all the works commence which have been distributed in minute
detail to many deities, Janus himself opens the way for the reception
of the seed; there also is Saturn, on account of the seed itself;
there is Liber,[246] who liberates the male by the effusion of the
seed; there is Libera, whom they also would have to be Venus, who
confers this same benefit on the woman, namely, that she also be
liberated by the emission of the seed;--all these are of the number
of those who are called select. But there is also the goddess Mena,
who presides over the menses; though the daughter of Jupiter, ignoble
nevertheless. And this province of the menses the same author, in his
book on the select gods, assigns to Juno herself, who is even queen
among the select gods; and here, as Juno Lucina, along with the same
Mena, her stepdaughter, she presides over the same blood. There also
are two gods, exceedingly obscure, Vitumnus and Sentinus--the one of
whom imparts life to the fœtus, and the other sensation; and, of a
truth, they bestow, most ignoble though they be, far more than all
those noble and select gods bestow. For, surely, without life and
sensation, what is the whole fœtus which a woman carries in her womb,
but a most vile and worthless thing, no better than slime and dust?