Argei (dolls)

Before even the beginning of the Argei festival the puppets were placed in the "sacra Argeorum" or the twenty four chapels around the Servian regions of Ancient Rome. These puppets were thought to absorb all the filth and impurities within the area. Hence the puppets became objects of sacrifice to remove impurities from Rome. This was an act of purification thought to have taken over the Lupercalia as Rome's population became grew to a size where the whipping purification ritual of the Lupercalia became ineffective.

Perhaps the most popular explanation, originating with Dionysius of Halicarnassus [Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, i.19, 38. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Dionysius_of_Halicarnassus/1B*.html#38.2] ] is that the ritual is a continuation of one in which actual humans were regularly sacrificed to the Tiber. These sacrifices were thought to be of men over the ages of sixty. The phrase "sexagenarios de ponte", was an expression of this Roman tradition.The pontifices and vestals were the main celebrants of the rituals. The festival started with a procession. However, we are not certain of the route of this procession. Fowler claims “we are tempted to believe that it visited each sacellum, and there found, or possibly made. The puppet (simulacrum), which thus represented the district of which the sacellum was the sacred.” Alternative interpretations from modern historians involve a pre-Imperial rite with the purpose of encouraging rain, or as an annual re-enactment of execution by drowning of twenty-seven captured Greeks.

Notes and References

Fowler The Roman Festivals pp113-120

ee also

* Flooding of the Nile

External links

* http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Post/674981