Lucaria

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In

Sabine territory.[4]

The

aetiological than historical.[9] The Lucaria suggests that grove veneration was a practice which the early Romans had in common with the Gauls.[10]

Like other "fixed holidays" (

dies nefasti publici) on the Roman calendar, the Lucaria took place on days of uneven number, with an intervening day that was "non-festive".[11] A mention by Macrobius[12] seems to imply that the festival began at night and continued the following day.[13] Georg Wissowa thought that it may have been connected to the Neptunalia on 23 July, when leafy huts, called umbrae, were built as shelters to protect against the hot summer sun and bulls were sacrificed.[14] Neptune embodied fresh as well as salt water among the Romans, and the collocation of festivals in July, including also the Furrinalia on 25 May express concerns for drought.[15]

See also

References

  1. Varro
    , De lingua latina 6.3.
  2. ^ Kurt Latte, Römische Religionsgeschicte (C.H. Beck, 1992), p. 88.
  3. Robert E.A. Palmer
    , The Archaic Community of the Romans (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 106.
  4. ^ Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Polity Press, 2007, originally published in German 2001), p. 189
  5. ^ As recorded by Festus: Lucaria festa in luco colebant Romani, qui permagnus inter viam Salariam et Tiberim fuit, pro eo, quod victi e Gallis fugientes e praelio ibi se occultaverint.
  6. ^ William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 182.
  7. ^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 183.
  8. ^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 182–183.
  9. ^ Ken Dowden, European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2000), p. 107.
  10. ^ Martin Henig, Religion in Roman Britain (Taylor & Francis, 1984, 2005), p. 15.
  11. ^ Michael Lipka, Roman Gods: A Conceptual Approach (Brill, 2009), pp. 38–39
  12. ^ Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.4.15.
  13. ^ According to Julius Caesar, Bellum Gallicum 6.18, the Gauls regularly reckoned time by nights rather than days: "They compute the divisions of every season, not by the number of days, but of nights; they keep birthdays and the beginnings of months and years in such an order that the day follows the night" (spatia omnis temporis non numero dierum sed noctium finiunt; dies natales et mensum et annorum initia sic observant ut noctem dies subsequatur).
  14. ^ Sarolta A. Takács, Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion (University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 53.
  15. ^ Robert Schilling, "Neptune," Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 138.