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The Robigalia was a Roman festivals in ancient Roman religion held April 25, named for the god Robigus. Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect wheat diseases. Games ( ludi) in the form of "major and minor" races were held.The ludi cursoribus are mentioned in the Fasti Praenestini; see Elaine Fantham, Ovid: Fasti Book IV (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 263. The Robigalia was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season,Mary Beard, J.A. North and S.R.F. Price. Religions of Rome: A History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 1, p. 45. 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.Rhiannon Evans, Utopia antiqua: Readings of the Golden Age and Decline at Rome (Routledge, 2008), pp. 185–188.
The late Republican scholar Varro says that the Robigalia was named for the god Robigus,Varro, De lingua latina 6.16. who as the numen or personification of agricultural disease could also prevent it.A.M. Franklin, The Lupercalia (New York, 1921), p. 74. He was thus a potentially malignant deity to be propitiated, as Aulus Gellius notes.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 ("Averruncus 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. But the gender of this deity is elusive.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. 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,Vergil, Georgics 1.151. The 4th-century agricultural writer Palladius devotes a chapter contra nebulas et rubiginem, on preventing miasma and mildew ( 1.35 ). 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,Davide Del Bello, Forgotten Paths: Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), passim. was thought to be connected to the color red ( ruber) as a form of or sympathetic magic.Burriss, The Place of the Dog in Superstition, pp. 34–35. The color is thematic: the disease was red, the requisite puppies (or sometimes bitches) had a red coat,Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 90–91. the red of blood recalls the distinctively Roman incarnation of Mars as both a god of agriculture and bloodshed.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 online and 53. See also Evans, Utopia antiqua, p. 188 online.
William Warde Fowler, whose work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference,William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 89. 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.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 syncretism Hellenistic 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 online (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 Mutunus Tutunus," Arethusa (1992) 173–179. See also indigitamenta. In support of this idea, the priest who presided was the flamen Quirinalis, and the ludi were held for both Mars and Robigo.Tertullian, De spectaculis 5: Numa Pompilius Marti et Robigini fecit ("Numa Pompilius established games for Mars and Robigo"). 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.Ovid, Fasti 4.905–942; Boyle and Woodard, Ovid: Fasti, pp. 254–255 et passim on the nature of this work.
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.Beard, Religions of Rome, p. 45. Varro considered these and the Robigalia, along with the Cybele's Megalensia late in the month, the "original" Roman holidays in April.Varro, De lingua latina 6.15–16; Fantham, Fasti, p. 29.
The Robigalia has been connected to the Christian Rogation days, 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.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. The Church Father Tertullian mocks the goddess Robigo as "made up," a fiction.Tertullian, De spectaculis 5 ( nam et robiginis deam finxerunt, "you see, they even make up a goddess of Wheat diseases"); Woodward, Indo-European Sacred Space, p. 136.
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