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This paper argues that Herod, to some extent, played the role of Augustus in the kingdom of Judea: reflecting on Herod's politics of constructing temples, parallels in the architecture of the Herodium and Augustus' Mausoleum, and the importance given to Herod's piety, the article shows important analogies between the actions of these two men. The largest and arguably the most important building project of king Herod was the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. This (re)construction is best understood in the context of Augustan thought: Herod presents the god of the Jews as a neglected god, a deus neglectus. It was to restore the dignity of this neglected god that the temple of Jerusalem had to be rebuilt.

In Fasti (2, 569 ff.), Ovid describes a ritual for the goddess Tacita, the purpose of which is to ward off gossip. If in some passages the symbolic associations appear predictable, elsewhere we are faced with relationships that are unexpected and at times quite disconcerting. For example: why, in order to “obstruct unfriendly tongues”, does the celebrant — an old woman — put “three grains of incense” in the opening that a mouse has made beneath the threshold? And why does she chew on “seven black fava beans”? In my opinion, the answer to these questions rests in the type of magic that Ovid describes here: not only “homeopathic”, but also “homeophonic” — that is, realized through symbolic associations of a phonic and verbal nature.

A recent discovery in the Pythagorean mathematical field leads to the deciphering of the Sator square, the earliest examples of which are in Pompeii. It hides another Latin inscription, in full, which shows that it's a Jewish cryptogram, based on the bronze altar in Ex 27 and the bronze serpent in Nb 21, as an identification mark and a symbol of salvation for the Diaspora. Furthermore, the word “sautran” below the Sator in Pompeii doesn't mean the greeting from someone called Sautran(us): before the letter N, symbol of the serpent according to the Judeo-Christian epigraphy, sautra transcribes an imperative of the hebrew root str “to hide”, the infinitive absolute of which is sator.

In Catholicism, the link between an individual and his protective angel recalls the relationship of patronage within the cult of the saints. Well-adapted to the clerical discourse of the Counter-Reformation, particularly to the Jesuit discourse on the “Final Judgment” and the ideal of personal sanctification, the good angel imposes itself primarily as an externalized moral conscience which has its place in a system of edification. If, for the Church, the guardian angel has the advantage of orienting the piety of the faithful towards the central cults of Catholicism (Christ and the Virgin Mary), it nevertheless remains a figure likely to be adapted to different levels of religiosity, according to movement towards feminization and infantilization.