Robigalia

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Robigo
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Robigalia
DurationApril 25
TypeFestival

The Robigalia was a festival in ancient Roman religion held April 25, named for the god Robigus. Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect grain fields from disease. Games (ludi) in the form of "major and minor" races were held.[1] The Robigalia was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season,[2] but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and the dependence on divine favor to avert it.[3]

Description

The Robigalia was held at the boundary of the

public religion of ancient Rome resulted in a communal meal and thus involved domestic animals whose flesh was a normal part of the Roman diet;[7] the dog occurs as a victim most often in magic and private rites for Hecate and other chthonic deities,[8] but was offered publicly at the Lupercalia[9] and two other sacrifices pertaining to grain crops.[10]

Origin

Religion in
ancient Rome
Marcus Aurelius sacrificing
Marcus Aurelius (head covered)
sacrificing at the Temple of Jupiter
Practices and beliefs
Priesthoods
Deities

Deified leaders:

Related topics

Like many other aspects of

Sabine god of war who become identified with Mars,[13] may suggest a Sabine origin.[14]

The

Mars as both a god of agriculture and bloodshed.[23]

Fasti, his six-book calendar poem on Roman holidays which provides the most extended, though problematic, description of the day.[27]

Other observances

Chariot races (ludi cursoribus) were held in honor of Mars and Robigo on this day.[28] The races had two classes, "major and minor," which may represent junior and senior divisions. In chariot racing, younger drivers seem to have gained experience with a two-horse chariot (biga) before graduating to a four-horse team (quadriga).[29]

Other horse and chariot races in honor of Mars occurred at the Equirria and before the sacrifice of the October Horse.

Calendar context

Fasti Praenestini
, with the entry on the "Feast of Robigo" at bottom right ("ROB").

The

sex workers: "pimped-out boys,"[30] following the previous day's recognition of meretrices, female prostitutes regarded as professionals of some standing.[31]

Other April festivals related to farming were the

Megalensia late in the month, the "original" Roman holidays in April.[33]

The Robigalia has been connected to the

Church Father Tertullian mocks the goddess Robigo as "made up," a fiction.[35]

References

  1. ^ The ludi cursoribus are mentioned in the Fasti Praenestini; see Elaine Fantham, Ovid: Fasti Book IV (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 263.
  2. ^ Mary Beard, J.A. North and S.R.F. Price. Religions of Rome: A History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 1, p. 45.
  3. ^ Rhiannon Evans, Utopia antiqua: Readings of the Golden Age and Decline at Rome (Routledge, 2008), pp. 185–188.
  4. ^ Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space, p. 234.
  5. ^ CIL 12 pp. 236, 316), as cited by Woodard.
  6. ^ Columella, De re rustica 10.337–343.
  7. ^ C. Bennett Pascal, "October Horse," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981), pp. 275–276; general discussion of victims' edibility by Hendrik Wagenvoort, "Profanus, profanare," in Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion (Brill, 1980), pp. 25–38.
  8. ^ David Soren, "Hecate and the Infant Cemetery at Poggio Gramignano," in A Roman Villa and a Late Roman Infant Cemetery («L'Erma» di Bretschneider, 1999), pp. 619–621.
  9. ^ Plutarch, Roman Questions 68 Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine; Eli Edward Burriss, "The Place of the Dog in Superstition as Revealed in Latin Literature," Classical Philology 30 (1935), pp. 34–35.
  10. ^ Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, p. 255.
  11. ^ William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1922), p. 108; Tertullian, De spectaculis 5.
  12. ^ Pliny, Natural History 18.285.
  13. ^ Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, p. 254; Beard, Religions of Rome, p. 106, note 129; Woodward, Indo-European Sacred Space, p. 136.
  14. comitia centuriata. Quirinus was assimilated with the deified Romulus, possibly as late as the Augustan
    period. See Robert Schilling, "Quirinus," Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 145.
  15. Varro
    , De lingua latina 6.16.
  16. ^ A.M. Franklin, The Lupercalia (New York, 1921), p. 74.
  17. ^ Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.12.14: In istis autem diis, quos placari oportet, uti mala a nobis vel a frugibus natis amoliantur, Auruncus quoque habetur et Robigus ("Auruncus and Robigus are also regarded as among those gods whom it is a duty to placate so that they deflect the malign influences away from us or the harvests"); Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 234.
  18. ^ In addition to Varro, Verrius Flaccus (CIL 1: 236, 316) and others hold that he is male; Ovid, Columella (see following), Augustine, and Tertullian regard the deity as female. A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodard, Ovid: Fasti (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 254 online. Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine
  19. miasma and mildew (1.35 Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine
    ).
  20. ^ Davide Del Bello, Forgotten Paths: Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), passim.
  21. ^ Burriss, "The Place of the Dog in Superstition, pp. 34–35.
  22. ^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 90–91.
  23. ^ This dual function of Mars, contradictory perhaps to the 21st-century mind, may not have seemed so to the Romans: "In early Rome agriculture and military activity were closely bound up, in the sense that the Roman farmer was also a soldier (and a voter as well)": Beard, Religions of Rome, pp. 47–48 online Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine and 53. See also Evans, Utopia antiqua, p. 188 online. Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine
  24. ^ William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 89.
  25. De civitate Dei 4.9, dea Robigo among them at 4.21); see W.R. Johnson, "The Return of Tutunus," Arethusa (1992) 173–179. See also indigitamenta
    .
  26. ^ Tertullian, De spectaculis 5: Numa Pompilius Marti et Robigini fecit ("Numa Pompilius established [games] for Mars and Robigo").
  27. Fasti
    4.905–942; Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, pp. 254–255 et passim on the nature of this work.
  28. ^ Fasti Praenestini; Tertullian, De spectaculis 5; Fantham, Ovid: Fasti Book IV, p. 263.
  29. ^ Jean-Paul Thuillier, "Le cirrus et la barbe. Questions d'iconographie athlétique romaine," Mélanges de l'École française de Rome Antiquité 110.1 (1998), p. 377.
  30. pimp
    .
  31. ^ Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford University Press, 1999, 2010), p. 32 online. Archived September 21, 2023, at the Wayback Machine
  32. ^ Beard, Religions of Rome, p. 45.
  33. ^ Varro, De lingua latina 6.15–16; Fantham, Fasti, p. 29.
  34. ^ Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 100.
  35. ^ Tertullian, De spectaculis 5 (nam et robiginis deam finxerunt, "you see, they even make up a goddess of wheat disease"); Woodward, Indo-European Sacred Space, p. 136.

Further reading

  • Alessandro Locchi, “Lucus Robiginis in Acqua Traversa”. Un antichissimo culto al V miglio della via Clodia, in Emergenze storico-archeologiche di un settore del suburbio di Roma: la Tenuta dell’Acqua Traversa. Atti della Giornata di Studio, Roma 7 giugno 2003, a cura di F. Vistoli, Roma 2005, pp. 151–170.
  • Fabrizio Vistoli, Nota di aggiornamento critico e bibliografico sui Robigalia, in La Parola del Passato, LXIV, 1 (CCCLXIV), 2009, pp. 35–46.

External links

  • Video of a modern festival of Robigalia in Piauí, Brazil
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