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]
Like many other aspects of
Roman law and religion, the institution of the Robigalia was attributed to the Sabine
Numa Pompilius,[11] in the eleventh year of his reign as the second
king of Rome.[12] The combined presence of Numa and the
flamen Quirinalis, the high priest of
Quirinus, the
Sabine god of war who become identified with Mars,[13] may suggest a Sabine origin.[14]
The
late Republican scholar
Varro says that the Robigalia was named for the god Robigus,[15] who as the
numen or
personification of agricultural disease could also prevent it.[16] He was thus a potentially malignant deity to be propitiated, as
Aulus Gellius notes.[17] But the gender of this deity is elusive.[18] The agricultural writer
Columella gives the name in the feminine as Robigo, like the word used for a form of the disease of
wheat rust,[19] which has a reddish or reddish-brown color. Both Robigus and robigo are also found as Rubig- which, following the
etymology-by-association of antiquity,[20] was thought to be connected to the color red (ruber) as a form of
homeopathic or
sympathetic magic.[21] The color is thematic: the disease was red, the requisite puppies (or sometimes bitches) had a red coat,[22] the red of blood recalls the distinctively Roman incarnation of
Mars as both a god of agriculture and bloodshed.[23]
William Warde Fowler, whose work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference,[24] entertained the idea that Robigus is an "indigitation" of Mars, that is, a name to be used in a prayer formulary to fix the local action of the invoked god.[25] In support of this idea, the priest who presided was the flamen Quirinalis, and the ludi were held for both Mars and Robigo.[26] The flamen recited a prayer that
Ovid quotes at length in the 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.
Other April festivals related to farming were the
Cerealia, or festival of
Ceres, lasting for several days in mid-month; the
Fordicidia on April 15, when a pregnant cow was sacrificed; the
Parilia on April 21 to ensure healthy flocks; and the
Vinalia, a wine festival on April 23.[32] Varro considered these and the Robigalia, along with the
Great Mother's
Megalensia late in the month, the "original" Roman holidays in April.[33]
The Robigalia has been connected to the
Christianfeast of Rogation, which was concerned with purifying and blessing the parish and fields and which took the place of the Robigalia on April 25 of the Christian calendar.[34] The
Church FatherTertullian mocks the goddess Robigo as "made up," a fiction.[35]
References
^The ludi cursoribus are mentioned in the Fasti Praenestini; see
Elaine Fantham, Ovid: Fasti Book IV (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 263.
^Mary Beard, J.A. North and S.R.F. Price. Religions of Rome: A History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 1, p. 45.
^Rhiannon Evans, Utopia antiqua: Readings of the Golden Age and Decline at Rome (Routledge, 2008), pp. 185–188.
^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.
^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.
^Plutarch, Roman Questions68Archived 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.
^Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, p. 254; Beard, Religions of Rome, p. 106, note 129; Woodward, Indo-European Sacred Space, p. 136.
^Franklin, Lupercalia, p. 75. The name Quirinus was supposed to
derive from the Sabine town of
Cures. In his notes to Aeneid 1.292 and 6.859,
Servius says that "when Mars rages uncontrolled (saevit), he is called Gradivus; when he is calm (tranquillus), he is called Quirinus." Therefore, since Quirinus is the "Mars" who presides over peace, his temple is within the city; the temple for the "Mars of war" is located outside the city limit. The name was also connected to Quirites, Roman civilians, and the civil comitia curiata, in contrast to military personnel and the 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.
^A.M. Franklin, The Lupercalia (New York, 1921), p. 74.
^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.
^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
^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
onlineArchived 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
^William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 89.
^Precise naming, in connection with concealing a deity's true name to monopolize his or her power, was a crucial part of prayer in antiquity, as evidenced not only in the traditional religions of Greece and Rome and
syncretisticHellenistic religion and
mystery cult, but also in
Judaism,
ancient Egyptian religion, and later
Christianity. See Matthias Klinghardt, “Prayer Formularies for Public Recitation: Their Use and Function in Ancient Religion,” Numen 46 (1999) 1–5; A.A. Barb, "Antaura. The Mermaid and the Devil's Grandmother: A Lecture," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966), p. 4; Karen Hartnup, On the Beliefs of the Greeks:
Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy (Brill, 2004), pp. 97–101
onlineArchived September 21, 2023, at the
Wayback Machine (in connection with compelling demons).
Augustine of Hippo derided the proliferation of divinities as a turba minutorum deorum, "a mob of mini-gods" (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.
^Tertullian, De spectaculis 5: Numa Pompilius Marti et Robigini fecit ("Numa Pompilius established [games] for Mars and Robigo").
^Ovid, Fasti 4.905–942; Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, pp. 254–255 et passim on the nature of this work.
^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.
^Varro, De lingua latina 6.15–16; Fantham, Fasti, p. 29.
^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.
^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