Taurian Games

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The Taurian Games (Latin Ludi Taurii or Ludi Taurei, rarely Taurilia

religious festival on the calendar, but were held as expiatory rites religionis causa, occasioned by religious concerns.[2]

Ludi Taurii are recorded in 186 BC as a two-day event.

The Taurian Games were horse races, or less likely

Saecular Games.[9] Horse racing along with the propitiation of underworld gods was characteristic of "old and obscure" Roman festivals such as the Consualia, the October Horse, and sites in the Campus Martius such as the Tarentum (where the ludi tarentini originated) and the Trigarium.[10] The Ludi Taurii were the only games held in the Circus Flaminius.[11]

If the games are

etiology based on Latin taurus, "bull."[14]

Origin and significance

In the tradition recorded by Festus,

Servius
also places their origin during his reign.

Festus explains that the games were performed in honor of the gods below (di inferi). They were established in response to an epidemic (magna … pestilentia) afflicting pregnant women, caused by the distribution of the flesh of sacrificial bulls (tauri) among the people. Servius implies that the pestilentia was

Sibylline books[16] or Etruscan texts[17]). According to Servius, the ludi took their name from the word taurea, meaning a sterile sacrificial victim (hostia).[18]

Servius gives an alternative version that credits the Sabines with instituting the games in response to the pestilentia, and characterizes the transferral of the lues publica (the plague upon the people) onto sacrificial victims (hostiae) as if it were a scapegoat ritual.[19]

Festus also provided an additional explanation of the name as taurus ("bull") from Varro,[20] preserved only in fragmentary form by the Codex Farnesianus.[21] A reconstruction dating back to J.J. Scaliger[22] has been taken to mean that youths, under the direction of a coach, engaged in ritual gymnastics on a raw bull's hide, perhaps to be compared to exercises on a trampoline.[23] This view has not attracted wide acceptance, but would suggest that the ritual action countervails infant mortality by affirming the fitness of the youth. Ritually, landing on the bull's skin may mimic the "catching" of a safely delivered newborn.[24]

The

decemviri sacris faciundis; he thought these priests were likely charged with organizing the Taurian Games.[25]

Earlier scholars have sometimes taken the adjective taurii to mean that bulls were part of the games, either in a Mediterranean tradition of

Roman Spain, the games have figured in a few efforts to trace the early history of Spanish-style bullfighting.[27]

References

  1. ^ Taurilia is an alternate reading of the relevant passage in Livy, 39.22; it is included as an entry in Forcellini's Totius Latinitatis Lexicon (1828), p. 708, and appears in some older editions of Livy and in scholarship from the 19th century. See notes in the 1825 edition of Livy by Arnold Drakenborch and Johann Freinsheim, p. 402.
  2. ^ John H. Humphrey, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing (University of California Press, 1986), p. 543; Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 82.
  3. ^ Livy, 39.22.
  4. ^ Varro, De lingua latina 5.154.
  5. ^ CIL xiv supp. 4541 (the Fasti Ostienses); John Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, Books 38–40 (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 19, 294; Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 544.
  6. ^ Eckart Köhne, "Bread and Circuses: The Politics of Entertainment," in Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000), p. 9; Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 543.
  7. ^ Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, p. 294; Humphrey, Roman Circuses, pp. 543–544.
  8. ^ Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 544; Varro, De lingua latina 5.154: "the horses run around the turning posts" (equi circum metas currunt).
  9. Saecular Ode, published in Schiller and Horace (Routledge, 1875), pp. 423–424, citing a then-current edition of Smith's Dictionary. By the 1890 edition of SMIGRA, a separate entry for Ludi Taurii Archived 2012-07-09 at archive.today had been added, with a few points of dubious factuality (see Bill Thayer's note to the entry Ludi Saeculares in the LacusCurtius edition of the 1875 SMIGRA, as well as his translation of and note to the entry Taurii Ludi in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines). The erroneous identification was nevertheless perpetuated in the Century Dictionary of 1891 (pp. 6189, 6199) and later editions. As early as 1701, however, Thomas Dempster had pointed out in his notes to the Antiquitatum Romanorum Corpus Absolutissimum of Johannes Rosinus that "many confuse the Taurian with the Saecular games, but they are in error: [the two] are entirely different" (p. 340). Ludwig Preller
    recognized the similarities, but suggested that the ludi taurii were performed irregularly when the Saecular Games would have been untimely; Römische Mythologie (1881), vol. 1, p. 92.
  10. ^ Humphrey, Roman Circuses, pp. 544, 558; Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Manuel des Institutions Romaines (Hachette, 1886), p. 549; "Purificazione," in Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (LIMC, 2004), p. 83. See also the Lusus Troiae.
  11. T.P. Wiseman
    , Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 211.
  12. ^ Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 544.
  13. ^ Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 15.
  14. ^ Humphrey, Roman Circuses, p. 544.
  15. ^ Festus, excerpts of Paulus, p. 479 in the edition of Lindsay.
  16. ^ Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, p. 294; Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l'antiquité (Jérôme Millon, 2003 reprint, originally published 1883), p. 1024.
  17. ^ Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination, p. 1024.
  18. Servius Danielis, note to Aeneid 2.140.
  19. ^ William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 176; Servius, note to Aeneid 2.140 (alii ludos Taureos a Sabinis propter pestilentiam institutos dicunt, ut lues publica in has hostias verteretur).
  20. ^ Festus, p. 478 (Lindsay).
  21. ^ Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, p. 294.
  22. ^ Sed Taurios ludos Varro ait vocari, quod eis ludis discipulus pendens a doctore in crudo corio tauri solitus sit inpelli, atque usque eo inibi cogi docere, quoad consisteret atque virtute talorum constaret pedum firmitas (italicized text is reconstructed); in English, "Varro, however, says that the Taurian Games are so called because it was customary at the games for a student, with a boost from his instructor, to be propelled on the raw hide of a bull (taurus), and to show by the extent of his action how sound he was and how the sureness of his feet 'stuck' by virtue of his heels." ("Stick" here is used in the sense of landing a gymnastics position correctly.) See André Dacier (1826), pp. 960–961.
  23. ^ J.D. Guigniaut on Frédéric Cruezer, Religions de l'antiquité (Paris, 1851) vol. 3, p. 1122.
  24. ^ For more on birthing in the Roman world, see Midwifery#History and the birth deities the Nixae, whose altar was located within a complex of sites associated with horse races and underworld gods in the Campus Martius.
  25. ^ Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (Munich, 1902), p. 388; noted also by Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, pp. 294–295.
  26. ^ Arnold Drakenborch in his 1825 edition of Livy took the Taurilia as involving actual bull fights (p. 400). See also Guigniaut on Cruezer, Religions de l'antiquité, p. 1122ff.
  27. ^ For instance, Edward Clarke, Letters concerning the Spanish Nation (London, 1763), pp. 113–115. The effort was derided by Charles Sumner, "Spanish Bull-Feasts and Bull-Fights," Quarterly Review (1839), p. 385ff., published anonymously and attributed to Sumner by Edward L. Pierce, Memoirs and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1893), vol. 2, p. 64.