Calendrical Notes

[Clavdivs]

To-day is the eighteenth day before the Kalends of February (ANTE DIEM XVIII KALENDAS FEBRVARII), in modern reckoning the fifteenth of the month. Warde Fowler notes to-day as NP, sacred to a god not of earthly character.

To-day is held the second Carmentalia, and we possess a nearly intact note in the Fasti of Praeneste (N.B. the translator has chosen to render NP NEFASTVS PVBLICVS):

''No Business; Public Holiday. Carmentalia. A festival of Carmentis, for the same reason as the 11th. This festival is said to have been established [by Romulus], because he captured Fidenae on this day.''

Warde Fowler notes that although there are several parallel examples of the festivals of related deities , or of two festivals to a single deity being held three days apart, as Consus and Ops (Aug. 21st and 25th) or the Fordicidia and Cerealia (April 15th and 19th) or again the Quinquatrum and Tubilustrium (both sacred to Mars, on the 19th and 23rd of March), this cannot be the case here, or we would not have two traditions of the foundation of this second Carmentalia as a separate and later festival.

Returning to the account given in the Fasti of Praeneste, Warde Fowler states that ''it [i.e. the second Carmentalia] was said to have been added by a victorious general who left Rome by the Porta Carmentalis to attack Fidenae''.

In Plutarch's Parallel Lives, we learn that the victorious general was none other than Romulus (Romulus Chapter 23):

''Fidenae, a neighbouring city to Rome, he took, as some say, by sending his horsemen of a sudden with orders to cut away the pivots of the gates, and then appearing himself unexpectedly; 6 but others say that the men of Fidenae first made an incursion, driving off booty and devastating the territory and outskirts of the city, and that Romulus set an ambush for them, killed many of them, and took their city. He did not, however, destroy or raze it to the ground, but made it a colony of Rome, and sent thither twenty-five hundred colonists, on the Ides of April.''

In the first book of the Fasti of Ovid, line 617 et seq., we possess the a quite different tradition of its origin:

''When the third sun shall look back on the past Ides, the sacred rites will be repeated in honour of the Parrhasian goddess. For of old Ausonian matrons drove in carriages (carpenta), which I ween were also called after Evander’s parent (Carmentis). Afterwards the honour was taken from them, and every matron vowed not to propagate the line of her ungrateful spouse by giving birth to offspring; and lest she should bear children, she rashly by a secret thrust discharged the growing burden from her womb. They say the senate reprimanded the wives for their daring cruelty, but restored the right of which they had been mulcted; and they ordained that now two festivals be held alike in honour of the Teagean mother to promote the birth of boys and girls.''

There are a good few erudite terms here that the beginner may find perplexing: Parrhasia is lower Arcadia, the region of the Peloponnese from whence Evander came, Ausonian is a poetic adjective signifying Italic or Roman and Teagean is the adjectival form of the name of an old Arcadian town, to wit Tegea, used poetically for Arcadian.

In the Quaestiones Romanes of Plutarch, No. 56 we find a similar story applied to the foundation of the temple of Carmenta:

''There is a certain tale repeated that the women were prevented by the senate from using horse-drawn vehicles; they therefore made an agreement with one another not to conceive nor to bear children, and they kept their husbands at a distance, until the husbands changed their minds and made the concession to them. When children were born to them, they, as mothers of a fair and numerous progeny, founded the temple of Carmenta.''

This account makes no distinction between the two Carmentalia and, for our purposes, is most useful as confirming that Ovid's account was at least current amongst the Romans.

However, should these traditions be erroneous, there is a few other possibilities:

Philipp Eduard Huschke, in his ''Alte roemische Jahr und seine Tage'' suggests that the two festivals are one Latin, the other Sabine, and date to the union of the Roman city on the Palatine with the Sabines. Warde Fowler suggests this is lent a little support by Plutarch in the 21st chapter of his ''Romulus'' thus:

''The Sabines, then, adopted the Roman months, about which I have written sufficiently in my Life of Numa. Romulus, on the other hand, made use of their oblong shields, and changed his own armour and that of the Romans, who before that carried round shields of the Argive pattern. Feasts and sacrifices they shared with one another, not discarding any which the two peoples had observed before, but instituting other new ones. One of these is the Matronalia, which was bestowed upon the women to commemorate their putting a stop to the war; and another is the Carmentalia. This Carmenta is thought by some to be a Fate presiding over human birth, and for this reason she is honoured by mothers. Others, however, say that the wife of Evander the Arcadian, who was a prophetess and inspired to utter oracles in verse, was therefore surnamed Carmenta, since "carmina" is their word for verses, her own proper name being Nicostrate. As to her own name there is general agreement, but some more probably interpret Carmenta as meaning bereft of mind, because of her ecstasies under inspiration, since "carere" is the Roman word for to be bereft, and "mens" for mind.''

Aulus Gellius, in the sixteenth chapter of the sixteenth book of the Attic Nights, gives us the following:

''For the purpose of averting this danger altars were set up at Rome to the two Carmentes, of whom one was called Postverta, the other Prorsa, named from natural and unnatural births, and their power over them.”

Warde Fowler suggests in a foot-note that it is at least conceivable that one of each of the two Carmentalia was devoted to Porrima and the other to Postvorta.

Ovid, in the section of the Fasti devoted to the first Carmentalia, alludes to the pure hearths of the goddess (plural, the Latin ''PVROS FOCOS''), so it is possible there were two altars in the temple, devoted to the two goddesses or aspects.

Regrettably we must conclude that even the antiquarians of Augustan Rome knew of several traditions surrounding this ancient festival and could not distinguish with exact certainty between them on account of its great antiquity.