William Warde Fowler in the context of "Howard Hayes Scullard"

Fontus or Fons (pl.: Fontes, "Font" or "Source") was a god of wells and springs in ancient Roman religion. A religious festival called the Fontinalia was held on October 13 in his honor. Throughout the city, fountains and wellheads were adorned with garlands.

Fontus was the son of Juturna and Janus. Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, was supposed to have been buried near the altar of Fontus (ara Fontis) on the Janiculum. William Warde Fowler observed that between 259 and 241 BC, cults were founded for Juturna, Fons, and the Tempestates, all having to do with sources of water. As a god of pure water, Fons can be placed in opposition to Liber as a god of wine identified with Bacchus.

In ancient Roman religion, the Fordicidia was a festival of fertility, held on the Ides of April (April 15), that pertained to farming and animal husbandry. It involved the sacrifice of a pregnant cow to Tellus, the ancient Roman goddess of the Earth, in proximity to the festival of Ceres (Cerealia) on April 19.

On the Roman religious calendar, the month of April (Aprilis) was in general preoccupied with deities who were female or ambiguous in gender, opening with the Feast of Venus on the Kalends. Several other festivals pertaining to farm life were held in April: the Parilia, a feast of shepherds, on April 21; the Robigalia on April 25, to protect crops from blight; and the Vinalia, one of the two wine festivals on the calendar, at the end of the month. Of these, the Fordicidia and Robigalia are likely to have been of greatest antiquity. William Warde Fowler, whose early 20th-century work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference, asserted that the Fordicidia was "beyond doubt one of the oldest sacrificial rites in Roman religion."

In ancient Roman religion, Tempestas (Latin tempestas: "season, weather; bad weather; storm, tempest") is a goddess of storms or sudden weather. As with certain other nature and weather deities, the plural form Tempestates is common. Cicero, in discussing whether natural phenomena such as rainbows and clouds should be regarded as divine, notes that the Tempestates had been consecrated as deities by the Roman people.

A temple (aedes or delubrum) was dedicated to the Tempestates (given in the singular by Ovid) by L. Cornelius Scipio in 259 BC, as recorded by his epitaph. Scipio had been caught in a storm with his fleet off Corsica, and the building of the temple was in fulfillment of a vow made in asking for deliverance. Ovid gives the dedication day as June 1, but it appears as December 23 in the Fasti Antiates Maiores; this latter date may mark a renovation, or there may have been more than one temple to the Tempestates. The temple vowed in 259 was located in Regio I, perhaps near the Tomb of the Scipios, and was connected with the temples of Mars and Minerva there. William Warde Fowler saw a pattern of temple dedications during this period that acknowledged water as a divine force, including the Temple of Juturna vowed in 241 by Lutatius Catulus, and the Temple of Fons during the Corsican war of 231. Black sheep were sacrificed at her temple.