ancient Roman religion Religion in ancient Rome consisted of varying imperial and provincial religious practices, which were followed both by the Roman people, people of Rome as well as those who were brought under its rule. The Romans thought of themselves as high ...

, the Fordicidia was a

festival A festival is an event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, Melā, mela, or Muslim holidays, eid. A ...

of fertility, held on the Ides of April (April 15), that pertained to

farming Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...

and

animal husbandry Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, animal fiber, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, management, production, nutrition, selective breeding, and the raising ...

. It involved the

sacrifice Sacrifice is an act or offering made to a deity. A sacrifice can serve as propitiation, or a sacrifice can be an offering of praise and thanksgiving. Evidence of ritual animal sacrifice has been seen at least since ancient Hebrews and Gree ...

of a pregnant cow to Tellus, the ancient Roman goddess of the

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

, in proximity to the festival of Ceres ( Cerealia) on April 19. Mary Beard, J.A. North, and S.R.F. Price, ''Religions of Rome: A History'' (Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 1
p. 45.
/ref> On the Roman religious calendar, the month of April ''( Aprilis)'' was in general preoccupied with deities who were female or ambiguous in gender, opening with the Feast of Venus on the Kalends. Several other festivals pertaining to farm life were held in April: the Parilia, a feast of shepherds, on April 21; the Robigalia on April 25, to protect crops from blight; and the Vinalia, one of the two wine festivals on the calendar, at the end of the month. Of these, the Fordicidia and Robigalia are likely to have been of greatest antiquity. William Warde Fowler, whose early 20th-century work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference, asserted that the Fordicidia was "beyond doubt one of the oldest sacrificial rites in Roman religion."Fowler, ''Roman Festivals'', p. 71.

Sacrifice and ritual

The late Republican scholar

Varro Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" (after Virgil and Cicero). He is sometimes call ...

explains the name of the festival as follows: Faunus Vienna Ma528

The forms ''horda'' and ''Hordicalia'' are also found. Like many other aspects of

Roman law Roman law is the law, legal system of ancient Rome, including the legal developments spanning over a thousand years of jurisprudence, from the Twelve Tables (), to the (AD 529) ordered by Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. Roman law also den ...

and religion, the institution of the Fordicidia was attributed to

Numa Pompilius Numa Pompilius (; 753–672 BC; reigned 715–672 BC) was the Roman mythology, legendary second king of Rome, succeeding Romulus after a one-year interregnum. He was of Sabine origin, and many of Rome's most important religious and political ins ...

, the

Sabine The Sabines (, , , ; ) were an Italic people who lived in the central Apennine Mountains (see Sabina) of the ancient Italian Peninsula, also inhabiting Latium north of the Anio before the founding of Rome. The Sabines divided int ...

second

king of Rome The king of Rome () was the ruler of the Roman Kingdom, a legendary period of Roman history that functioned as an elective monarchy. According to legend, the first king of Rome was Romulus, who founded the city in 753 BC upon the Palatine H ...

. The rustic god

Faunus In Religion in ancient Rome, ancient Roman religion and Roman mythology, myth, Faunus was the rustic god of the forest, plains and fields; when he made cattle fertile, he was called Inuus. He came to be equated in literature with the Greek god ...

instructed Numa in a dream that a sacrifice to Tellus would mitigate the harsh agricultural conditions Rome was grappling with, but the oracular message required interpretation: "By the death of cattle, King, Tellus must be placated: two cows, that is. Let a single heifer yield two lives ''(animae)'' for the rites." Numa solved the riddle by instituting the sacrifice of a pregnant cow. As with other rituals in which public cult was mirrored by private, or ''vice versa'', one sacrifice was conducted on behalf of the

state State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

, in this case at the Capitol, and one in each of the thirty ''curiae'', the most ancient divisions of the city made by

Romulus Romulus (, ) was the legendary founder and first king of Rome. Various traditions attribute the establishment of many of Rome's oldest legal, political, religious, and social institutions to Romulus and his contemporaries. Although many of th ...

from the original three tribes. This was the first of two festivals involving the ''curiae'', the other being the Fornacalia on February 17, which differed in that there was no ritual of state corresponding to the local ceremonies and its moveable date was fixed annually by the '' curio maximus''. Chief Vestal

In the state sacrifice for the Fordicidia, the unborn calf was wrenched from its mother's womb by the attendants of the ''Virgo Vestalis Maxima'', or Vestal Maxima, and burnt. Its ashes were preserved by the Vestals and used as one of the ingredients in the ritual substance ''suffimen'', along with the dried blood of the

October Horse In Religion in ancient Rome, ancient Roman religion, the October Horse (Latin ''Equus October'') was an animal sacrifice to Mars (mythology), Mars carried out on October 15, coinciding with the end of the Roman agriculture, agricultural and mili ...

from the previous year, and the stalks from which beans had been harvested. The ''suffimen'' was sprinkled on the bonfires of the Parilia, the festival devoted to purifying shepherds and their sheep, and later celebrated also as the "birthday" of the city. The sacrifice at the Fordicidia and preparation of the ''suffimen'' constituted the first public ceremony of the year in which the Vestals played an active role.

Meaning

The purpose of the sacrifice, as suggested by the Augustan poet

Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...

in his elegiac calendar and by the 6th-century

antiquarian An antiquarian or antiquary () is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient artefacts, archaeological and historic si ...

John Lydus in his book ''On the Months'', was to assure the fertility of the planted grain already growing in the womb of Mother Earth in the guise of Tellus, to whom the sacrifice was offered. As with certain other rituals over which the Vestals presided, the unborn calf is a liminal or mediating being: not yet born, but living; not a full-fledged victim, but sacrificed. The role of the Vestals emphasizes their importance in linking through the ritual reuse of elements the Earth's fertility, the health and safety of the flocks, and the security of the city, including and especially its military security against invasion. The Fordicidia, along with about half the festivals of Republican Rome, does not appear on the calendar of 354, when the

empire An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...

was becoming Christianized.

Comparison

In the spirit of the Cambridge Ritualists and comparative mythologists, Fowler pointed to a Chinese spring festival witnessed in 1804 by the British ambassador to China, John Barrow. At the temple of Earth, a large porcelain cow was carried in procession then shattered to reveal several small cow-images inside. These were distributed among the people as tokens of a good growing season. Fowler speculated that the Chinese rite was in origin an animal sacrifice similar to that of the Fordicidia.Fowler, ''Roman Festivals'', p. 72.

References

{{Roman religion (festival) Ancient Roman festivals Roman animal sacrifice April observances