The Fires of the Parilia

The Parilia, held every year on April 21, was one of the oldest festivals in the Roman calendar. It honored Pales, the deity who protected shepherds and their flocks. Ovid gives the fullest account in his poem on the Roman calendar, the Fasti. At dusk the shepherd swept the fold, hung it with greenery and garlands, and purified the sheep with the smoke of sulphur, laurel and other burning plants. He offered Pales millet cakes and milk, prayed for the health of the flock, and then leapt over heaps of burning straw. Ovid says he had jumped three fires laid in a row and been sprinkled with water from a wet laurel bough. Propertius and Tibullus also describe the leap over the straw fires.

The day carried a second meaning. Roman tradition, recorded by Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch, held that Romulus founded the city on the Parilia, and Romans kept April 21 as the birthday of Rome. In the city, Ovid adds, people fetched a purifying mixture from the Vestal Virgins to burn at their own fires.