The Robigalia was a festival of ancient Roman religion held on April 25, named after the god Robigus. Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect the grain fields from disease. Games (ludi) in the form of "major and minor" races were held. The Robigalia was one of several April agricultural festivals to celebrate and energize the growing season, but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and reliance on divine favor to avert it.
Robigalia, games for a better harvest
The Robigalia took place on the edge of the Ager Romanus. Verrius Flaccus places it in a grove (lucus) at the fifth milestone from Rome along the Via Claudia. The celebration included games (ludi) and a sacrificial offering of the blood and entrails of an unweaned puppy (catulus). Most animal sacrifices in the public religion of ancient Rome culminated in a communal meal and thus involved domestic animals whose flesh was a normal part of the Roman diet; the dog most often appears as a victim in magical and private rites for Hecate and other chthonic deities, but was offered publicly at the Lupercalia and at two other sacrifices relating to cereal crops.
Like many other aspects of Roman law and religion, the institution of the Robigalia was attributed to the Sabine Numa Pompilius, in the eleventh year of his reign as the second king of Rome. The combined presence of Numa and the flamen Quirinalis, the high priest of Quirinus, the Sabine god of war who identified with March, may suggest a Sabine origin.
The late Republican scholar Varro says that Robigalia was named after the god Robigus, who, as the numen or personification of agricultural disease, could also prevent it. He was therefore a potentially malignant deity to propitiate, as Aulus Gellius notes. But the gender of this deity is elusive. The agricultural writer Columella gives the name in the feminine as Robigo, like the word used for a form of the wheat rust disease, which has a reddish or reddish-brown color.
Robigus and robigo are also found under the name Rubig – which, following the etymology by association of antiquity, was considered to be related to the color red (ruber) as a form of homeopathic or sympathetic magic. The color is thematic: the disease was red, the puppies (or sometimes bitches) needed had red fur, the red of blood recalls the typically Roman incarnation of Mars as the god of agriculture and bloodshed.
William Warde Fowler, whose work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference, entertained the idea that Robigus was an "indigitation" of Mars, that is, a name to be used in a prayer formulary to fix the local action of the god invoked. In support of this idea, the presiding priest was the flamen Quirinalis, and the ludi were held for both Mars and Robigo. The flamen recited a prayer that Ovid quotes at length in the Fasti, his six-part calendar poem. books on Roman festivals which provides the most extensive, if problematic, description of the day.
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On this day, the Romans celebrated Robigalia. Created by the second king of Rome, this festival aims to protect crops from disease and promote soil fertility. #mythology #myth #legend #25April #calendar #robigalia #rome
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