[4] "These statuettes were frequently made in the likeness of some divinity, such as Hercules, Minerva, Apollo Sauroctunus, Victory or of some celebrated mythological character (Danäe or Hyacinthus); failing this, of some purely fantastic type, such as a hermaphrodite or hunchback.
"[4] In the dialogue of Macrobius's Saturnalia, the interlocutor Praetextatus says that sigillaria were substitutes for the sacrificial victims of the primitive religious rituals.
Or take the Sigillaria he just mentioned: the holiday and its clay figurines are meant to amuse infants who haven’t yet learned to walk, but he tries to make it a matter of religious duty.
"Epicadus reports that when Hercules had slain Geryon and led his cattle victoriously through Italy, he built the Sublician bridge (as it’s now called) so that he could cast into the river human effigies equal in number to the companions he had lost to mischance on his journey: that way, they could be carried along by the current to the sea and be restored, in a sense, to their ancestral homes in place of the bodies of the dead.
"[8] For the four-day fair, vendors of the figurines and other gifts set up temporary stalls in the Campus Martius, and later in the portico of the Baths of Trajan.