in Antiquity, sacrifices or ceremonies by which the ancients purified their cities, fields, armies, or people, defiled by any crime or impurity. Some of these lustrations were public and others private. There were several ways of performing lustration, viz. by fire, by sulphur, by water, and by air, the last being done by fanning and agitating the air round the thing to be purified. Some of these lustrations were necessary, and could not be dispensed with, as lustrations of houses in time of a plague, or upon the death of any person; others, again, were performed from choice, and at pleasure. The public lustrations at Rome were celebrated every fifth year, in which they led a victim thrice round the place to be purified, and in the mean time burned a great quantity of perfumes. The country lustrations, called ambarralia, were celebrated before the peasants began to reap the corn; in those of the armies, called armilustria, some chosen soldiers, crowned with laurel, led the victims, a cow, a sheep, and a bull, thrice round the army ranged in battle-array in the field of Mars, to which deity the victims were subsequently sacrificed, after pouring out many imprecations upon the enemies of the Romans. The lustrations of the flocks were performed in this manner. The shepherd sprinkled them with pure water, thrice surrounded his sheepfold with a composition of savin, laurel, and brimstone set on fire, and afterwards sacrificed to the goddess Pales an offering of milk boiled, wine, a cake, and millet. As for private houses, they were lustrated with water, a fumigation of laurel, juniper, olive-tree, savin, and the like; and the victim was commonly a pig. Lustrations made for particular persons were commonly called expiations, and the victims piscula. There was also for infants a kind of lustration, by which they were purified, girls on the third, and boys on the ninth day after their birth; a ceremony which was performed with pure water and spittle. In lustratory sacrifices, the Athenians sacrificed two men, one for the men of their city, and the other for the women. Several of these expiations were austere; some fasted, others abstained from all sensual pleasures; and a few, as the priests of Cybele, castrated themselves. The postures of the penitents were different according to the different sacrifices. The priests changed their habits according to the ceremony to be performed; but white, purple, and black, were the most usual colours. They cast into the river, or at least out of the city, the animals or other things which had served for a lustration or sacrifice of atonement; and thought themselves threatened with some great misfortune when by chance they trod upon them. Part of these ceremonies were abolished by the Emperor Constantine and his successors; the rest subsisted till the Gothic kings became masters of Rome, when they expired.