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.
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