Festival
of Floralia
(Florifertum; Floral Games), Roman Empire (Apr 28 - May 3)
In the Northern Hemisphere,
spring is well
underway, the days are getting warmer, the flowers are blooming, and the
birds and bees are active. The ancient Romans knew how to celebrate it.
The Floralia, or Florales Ludi, was a six-day
festival for
the goddess
Flora,
deity (originally Sabine)
of flowers and youthful pleasures, whose
cult was said to have been introduced by
Numa.
Flora was also the goddess of spring, especially
associated with vines, olives, fruit trees and honey-bearing plants.
A temple was built for her at the
Circus Maximus between the
Aventine and the
Palatine hills, and a shrine was built at the
Quirinal at which corn stalks were offered.
When
Augustus became
Pontifex
Maximus, he built a chapel to
Vesta in his own house on the Palatine, and dedicated it on
this day, which was made a public holiday.
It was a festival of sexual fun and
liberty and marked by the consumption of oceans of grog. Beans and other
seeds were planted, representing fecundity. Originally a movable feast
controlled by the condition of the crops and flowers, it’s believed to
have been instituted in 238 BCE under the command of an oracle in the
Sibylline Books, with the purpose of gaining from the goddess the protection of the blossoms. Games were instituted in honour of
Flora at that time, but were soon discontinued before being restored in
173 BCE in the consulship of
Lucius Postumius Albinus and
Marcus Popillius Laenas
as a six-day festival, after storms had destroyed crops and vines.
Day and night there were games,
pantomimes, theatre and stripteases with people of all classes in their
brightest clothes, all decked out in flowers – even their animals were
garlanded and Rome must have looked particularly beautiful at this time.
Goats and hares were let loose as they represented fertility.
Gift-giving for the season included small vegetables as tokens of sex
and fertility. Use your imagination.
Early
sexual performances of courtesans were probably for the promotion of
fertility, but before long the season was a celebration of general sexual freedom
among the whole populace until the authorities clamped down. Lactantius,
a contemporary writer, went as far as to record that Flora was a
prostitute who instituted the festival for her birthday celebrations,
and on whom the Senate conferred the status of deity. In fact, the
origins of the Floralia are associated in Greece with Aphrodite in her
aspect as the goddess of flowering plants (Antheia) before the festival
found its way to Italy.
William
Smith, in his characteristically
wowserish intonation,
tells us that the Floralia "were originally festivals of the country
people, which were afterwards, in Italy as in Greece, introduced into
the towns, where they naturally assumed a more dissolute and licentious
character, while the country people continued to celebrate them in their
old and merry but innocent manner".
Make a
happy Floralia, and watch out for the authorities!
Fair Flora! Now attend thy sportful feast,
Of which some days I with design have past;
A part in April and a part in May
Thou claim’st, and both command my tuneful lay;
And as the confines of two months are thine
To sing of both the double task be mine.
Latin poet
Ovid,
Fasti, v, 185, for Flora (Floralia)
Apr 28 -
May 3
Roman calendar
Cicero was a serious-minded man and by way of being
a philosopher. When he was entering on the aedileship he shouted out, in the
hearing of the whole citizen body, that among the other duties of his office
it fell to him to propitiate Mother Flora by the holding of games.
St Augustine,
De Civitate Dei, 11, 27
Flora, the Goddess of flowers, but indede (as
saith Tacitus) a famous harlot, which … having gotten great riches, made the
people of Rome her heyre: who, in remembraunce of so great beneficence,
appointed a yearly feste for the memoriall of her, calling her, not as she
was, nor as some doe think, Andronica, but Flora; making her the Goddesse of
floures.
Edmund
Spenser,
The
Shepheardes Calendar
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