Roman Republic Numerius Fabius Pictor moneyer Silver Denarius 16mm (3.77 grams) Rome mint, circa 126 B.C. Reference: Fabia 11; B.M.C.1173-9; Sydenham 517a; Crawford 268/1b Head of Roma right, star behind. The Flamen Quirinalis, Q. Fabius Pictor, wearing cuirass and helmet, seated l. on chair and holding apex (sacrificial cap) and spear; beside, shield inscribed QVI / RIN; N·FABI on right; PICTOR on left; ROMA in exergue.
Q. Fabius Pictor was appointed praetor of Sardinian in 187 B.C., but, as he had been consecrated flamen quirinalis, was not allowed to take up his post. He is therefore represented as a soldier and a priest. Quintus Fabius (Q. f. C. n.) Pictor, praetor in 189 BC, received Sardinia as his province, but was compelled by the pontifex maximus to remain at Rome, because he was Flamen Quirinalis; his abdication was rejected by the senate, which designated him praetor peregrinus.
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The gens Fabia was one of the most ancient patrician families at Rome. The gens played a prominent part in history soon after the establishment of the Republic, and three brothers were invested with seven successive consulships, from 485 to 479 BC, thereby cementing the high repute of the family. The house derived its greatest lustre from the patriotic courage and tragic fate of the 306 Fabii in the Battle of the Cremera, 477 BC. But the Fabii were not distinguished as warriors alone; several members of the gens were also important in the history of Roman literature and the arts.
In traditional Roman religion, Roma was a female deity who personified the city of Rome and more broadly, the Roman state.
In ancient Roman religion, a flamen was a priest assigned to one of fifteen deities with official cults during the Roman Republic. The most important three were the flamines maiores (or “major priests”), who served the three chief Roman gods of the Archaic Triad. The remaining twelve were the flamines minores (“lesser priests”). Two of the minores cultivated deities whose names are now unknown; among the others are deities about whom little is known other than the name. During the Imperial era, the cult of a deified emperor (divus) also had a flamen.
The fifteen Republican flamens were part of the Pontifical College which administered state-sponsored religion. When the office of flamen was vacant, a pontifex could serve as a temporary replacement, although only the Pontifex Maximus is known to have substituted for the Flamen Dialis.
The official costume of a flamen, of great antiquity, was a hat called an apex and a heavy woolen cloak called a laena. The laena was a double-thick wool cloak with a fringed edge, and was worn over the flamen’s toga with a clasp holding it around his throat. The apex was a leather skull-cap with a chin-strap and a point of olive wood on its top, like a spindle, with a little fluff of wool at the base of the spindle.
In ancient Roman religion, the Flamen Quirinalis was the flamen devoted to the cult of god Quirinus. He was one of the three flamines maiores, third in order of importance after the Flamen Dialis and the Flamen Martialis. As the other ones he had to reside in Rome and was not allowed to leave the city for any reason.
The theology of Quirinus is complex and difficult to interpret. From early times, he was identified with the deified Romulus, who originally seems to have shared some common theological and mythological elements with Quirinus.
Ritual functions
The flamen Quirinalis presided over at least three festivals, the Consualia Aestiva on August 21, Robigalia on April 25, and Larentalia on December 23.
These festivals were all devoted to the cult of deities of remarkable antiquity: Consus has been described as the god of the stored grains (from condere, to store grains in an underground barn or silos). Robigus was an evil spirit that could cause mildew and thus damage growing wheat. Larenta was a figure connected to the primordial legendary times of Rome or to the founding of the city itself.
During the Consualia Aestiva the flamen Quirinalis and the Vestals offered a sacrifice at Consus’s underground altar in the Circus Maximus. Four days later the Vestals took part in the rites of the festival of Ops, goddess of agricultural plenty, the Opiconsivia. This occasion was related to Consus too and was performed in the Regia of the forum, where Ops had a very sacred chapel, open only to the pontifex maximus and the Vestals.
The Robigalia of April 25 required the sacrificial offering of blood and entrails from a puppy, and perhaps also the entrails of a sheep. The rite took place near the fifth milestone of the Via Claudia. Ovid talks of a lucus (grove) on the site and reports a long prayer he says was pronounced by the flamen Quirinalis. While the prayer may contain elements from an actual formulation, Ovid’s text is a poetic recreation.
The Larentalia of December 23 were a parentatio, an act of funerary cult in memory of Larunda or Larentia. A sacrifice was offered at the site of her supposed tomb on the Velabrum. She was not a goddess but a sort of heroine, with two conflicting legends: in the first (and probably elder one) Larentia is a courtesan who had become fabulously rich after spending a night in the sanctuary of Heracles. Later she had bestowed her fortune on the Roman people on the condition that a rite named after her were held yearly. In the second she is Romulus and Remus’s wet nurse, also considered the mother of the Fratres Arvales and a she wolf. Gellius in a detailed passage on Larentia makes a specific reference to the flamen Quirinalis. Macrobius makes reference to the presence of an unnamed flamen, “per flaminem”. This flamen could neither be the Dialis nor the Martialis, let alone the minores, given the nature of parentatio (funeral rite) of the festival.
Beside these festivals that of Quirinus himself, the Quirinalia, would logically and probably require the participation of the flamen Quirinalis. The Quirinalia were held on February 17 and must be among the oldest Roman yearly festivals.
Quirinalia
Some scholars connect the Quirinalia festival with the anniversary date of the murder of Romulus by his subjects on the basis of the calendar of Polemius Silvius and of Ovid, where the story of Romulus’s apotheosis is related, and accordingly interpret the festival as a funerary parentatio.
Dumezil on the other hand remarks that in all other sources the date of this event is July 7 (Nonae Caprotinae). Neither there is any record of such a ritual in ancient sources.
He puts forward another interpretation based on the fact that the only religious ritual recorded for that day are the stultorum feriae, i.e. the last day of the Fornacalia. This festival used to be celebrated separately by each of the thirty curiae. Therefore the Fornacalia had no fixed date and were not mentioned on calendars. Every year the curio maximus established the days for each curia. However those who had missed their day (stulti, fool ones) were allowed an extra off day to make amends collectively. Festus and Plutarch state that the stultorum feriae were in fact the Quirinalia. Their assertion seems acceptable to Dumézil for two reasons:
1) if it were not so then no Roman writer gave any indication of their content. This is highly unlikely for in Rome religious rituals often survived their theological justification.
2) the stultorum feriae bring to an end the organised operation of the curiae in the Fornacalia and this is a guarantee of their antiquity.
The connection hypothesised by Dumezil between the flamen Quirinalis and an activity regulated through the curiae is important as it supports the interpretation of Quirinus as a god of the Roman civil society. The curiae were in fact the original smallest grouping of Roman society.
The most probable etymology of curia is considered by many scholars, to be rooted in *co-viria and that of quirites in *co-virites.
The Virites were goddesses worshipped along with Quirinus: Gellius, writes to have read in the pontificales libri, that dea Hora and Virites were invoked in prayers in association with the god. The Virites, Quirinus’s female paredrae, must be the expression of the god’s virtus, in the case of Quirinus namely the personification of the individuals composing Roman society as citizens, in the same way as e.g. Nerio, Mars’s paredra, must be the personification of military prowess.
Hence Quirinus would be the Roman homologous of the correspondent last component god of the supreme divine triad among all Italic peoples, such as the Vofionus of the Iguvine Tables, whose name too has been interpreted as a term meaning the increaser of the people (either from Loifer, or from Luther, an abbreviation from Greek Eleutheros) or simply the people, related to German Leute. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that the two first god names at Iguvium are identical to their Roman counterpart (Jov- and Mart-) and grammatically were nouns, whereas name Vofiono- is an adjectival derivation in no- of a noun root, just as *Co-virino. Moreover philologists Vittor Pisani and Emile Benveniste have proposed a likely etymology for Vofiono- that makes it the equivalent in meaning of *Co-virino: Leudhyo-no.
Relation to Dumezil’s Trifunctional Hypothesis
The Consualia, Robigalia, Larentalia, and the last act of Fornacalia (the Quirinalia) are the religious rituals performed by flamen Quirinalis. If Romans’ traditions were conserved, rather than re-adapted, these rituals should reflect the most ancient and original nature of god Quirinus. The festivals connect him to wheat at the three important and potentially risky stages of its growth, storing, and preservation. Quirinus is thus concerned with a staple food. He cooperates with god Consus, as is testified by the role of his flamen in the Consualia, to the aim of assuring the nurture of the Roman people.
There is also a connection between the function of the flamen Quirinalis in the Quirinalia and the functioning of organized Roman society as expressed through the role played by the curiae in the Fornacalia. The curiae were in fact the smallest cell of ancient Roman society. The role of the flamen Quirinalis in the Larentalia is also significant. In the two legends concerning Larentia she is a figure related to nurture, agricultural plenty, and wealth. She rears the divine twins, is the mother of the Fratres Arvales, performers of the agricultural propitiary rite of the Ambarvalia, and bestows wealth on her heirs and figurative children. Her story hints to the link of sexual pleasure and wealth. In the interpretation of Dumézil this has to do with the Indo-European myth of the divine twins, but Romulus’s connections to kingship and war are not necessarily part of the original conception of Quirinus.
According to Dumezil the theological character of the god as reflected in the functions of his flamen is thence civil and social, being related to nurture, fertility, plenty, wealth, and pleasure. This features make him the chief of all the gods of what he defines as the third function in Indo-European religions.
Brelich’s identification of Romulus with Quirinus as a mythical archetype of primitive religion
Italo-Hungarian religious historian Angelo Brelich advanced a hypothesis that could bring together all of the poorly understood elements of the religious traditions concerning Romulus and Quirinus. He argues it is not likely that the two figures were merged at a later stage in the development of the legend, but they were in fact one since the most ancient times. This view allows us to understand why the Fornacalia, the feast of the toasting of spelt, were also one of the traditional dates of the murder of Romulus: according to this tradition the king was killed by the patres, his body dismembered and each bit of it buried within their own plots of land. Brelich sees in this episode a clear reflection of a mythical theme found in primitive religion and known as the Dema deity archetype (from the character of Hainuwele in Melanesian religion first described by German ethnologist Adolf Ellegard Jensen). In such a pattern a founder hero is murdered and dismembered, his corpse turning into the staple food of his own ethnos.
The Roman Republic (Latin: Res Publica Romana) was the period of the ancient Roman civilization when the government operated as a republic.
It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 509 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and advised by a senate. A complex constitution gradually developed, centered on the principles of a separation of powers and checks and balances. Except in times of dire national emergency, public offices were limited to one year, so that, in theory at least, no single individual could dominate his fellow citizens.
Roman society was hierarchical. The evolution of the Constitution of the Roman Republic was heavily influenced by the struggle between the patricians, Rome’s land-holding aristocracy, who traced their ancestry back to the early history of the Roman kingdom, and the plebeians, the far more numerous citizen-commoners. Over time, the laws that gave patricians exclusive rights to Rome’s highest offices were repealed or weakened, and a new aristocracy emerged from among the plebeian class. The leaders of the Republic developed a strong tradition and morality requiring public service and patronage in peace and war, making military and political success inextricably linked.
During the first two centuries of its existence the Republic expanded through a combination of conquest and alliance, from central Italy to the entire Italian peninsula. By the following century it included North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Greece, and what is now southern France. Two centuries after that, towards the end of the 1st century BC, it included the rest of modern France, and much of the eastern Mediterranean. By this time, despite the Republic’s traditional and lawful constraints against any individual’s acquisition of permanent political powers, Roman politics was dominated by a small number of Roman leaders, their uneasy alliances punctuated by a series of civil wars.
The victor in one of these civil wars, Octavian, reformed the Republic as a Principate, with himself as Rome’s “first citizen” (princeps). The Senate continued to sit and debate. Annual magistrates were elected as before, but final decisions on matters of policy, warfare, diplomacy and appointments were privileged to the princeps as “first among equals” later to be known as imperator due to the holding of imperium, from which the term emperor is derived. His powers were monarchic in all but name, and he held them for his lifetime, on behalf of the Senate and people of Rome.
The Roman Republic was never restored, but neither was it abolished, so the exact date of the transition to the Roman Empire is a matter of interpretation. Historians have variously proposed the appointment of Julius Caesar as perpetual dictator in 44 BC, the defeat of Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and the Roman Senate‘s grant of extraordinary powers to Octavian under the first settlement and his adopting the title Augustus in 27 BC, as the defining event ending the Republic.
Many of Rome’s legal and legislative structures can still be observed throughout Europe and much of the world in modern nation states and international organizations. Latin, the language of the Romans, has influenced language across parts of Europe and the world.
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