COMPITALIA. A popular Roman festival held in honour of the " lares compitales," that is to say, of the Lares, the good spirits of the departed, regarded as tutelary divinities of the cross-ways (compita). The festival was held four times a year. W. Warde Fowler thinks that the Lar was an object of worship on the land before it became such in the house. " The oldest Lar of whom we know anything was one of a char acteristic Roman group of which the individuals lived in the cornpita, i.e. the spots where the land belonging to various households met, and where there were chapels with as many faces as there were properties, each face containing an altar to a Lar,—the presiding spirit of that allotment, or rather perhaps of the whole of the land of the familia, including that on which the house stood." The rejoicing, in which the whole familia, both bond and free, took part was free and jovial. " Each
familia sacrificed on its own altar, which was placed fifteen feet in front of the compitum, so that the wor shippers might be on their own land; but if, as we may suppose, the whole pagus celebrated this .rite on the same day, there was in this festival, as in others . . . a social value, a means of widening the outlook of the familia and associating it with the needs of others in its religious duties." At the festival of the Compitalia, as at the Paganalia, small images of the hinhan figure or round balls were bung on trees or doorways that they might swing in the wind. The common name for these figures was oscilla, but those of the Compitalia had a special name, maniae, of which the meaning has been lost. For the meaning of this custom see SWINGING, and cp. PAGANALIA. See O. Seyffert, Diet.; W. Warde Fowler.