“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
- attributed to Patrick Henry at St. John’s Church in Richmond, VA 3-23-1775
The fifth and final day of Quinquatria was also Tubilustrium.
The ceremony of the Purification of the Trumpets, held on 23 March, was repeated on 23 May and in both months the following day was marked in the Calendars as QRCF (Quando Rex Comitiavit Fas). A note in the Praenestine calendar records that 23 March was called Tubilustrium because during it ‘the trumpets used in the sacred rites are purified in the Hall of the Shoemakers’ (in atrio sutorio lustrantur, quibus in sacris utuntur); a ewe lamb was sacrificed. The site of the Hall is not known. The note further describes the Tubilustrium as a festival of Mars, thought Ovid attributes it forti deae, namely Minerva. John Lydus, who mentions the Salian priests, says that the worship was paid to Mars and a goddess called in the Sabine tongue Nerine; she will be Nerio, the alleged wife of Mars. Thus the Tubilustrium developed in the same way as the Quinquatrus.
The nature of the trumpets (tubi) is not clear. They are generally taken to have been ritual instruments (like the sacred ancilia) for use in summoning the assembly on the following day, but presumably the ceremony also involved a symbolic purification of the trumpets of the whole army. Whether any actual military instruments were used or representatives of the army (as the tribuni at the Quinquatrus) were present, we do not know. Another suggestion is that ordinary trumpets were used which then became purified, that is when Ovid says ‘lustrantur purae…tubae’, the purae is proleptisc. In any case the ceremony was designed to help to make the army fit for war, and many Romans who did not attend it would be reminded of the occasion by seeing the Salii dancing through the streets of the city.
- Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic by H.H. Scullard, by way of a 3-23-03 post at Nova Roma’s forum
Having once been displaced by Minerva, Nerio vanished from the calendar, and with her that special aspect of Mars – whatever it may have been – which the name was intended to express. The five days, 18th to 23rd, became permanently associated with Minerva. The 19th was the dedication day of at least one of her temples, and counted as her birthday: the 23rd was the Tubilustrium, with a sacrifice to ‘dea fortis,’ who seems to have been taken for Minerva, owing to an incorrect idea that the latter was specially the deity of trumpet-players. She was no doubt an old Italian deity of artificers and trade guilds; but the Tubilustrium was really a Mars festival, and Minerva had no immediate connexion with it.
- The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic by William Warde Fowler
On 3-23-1919, El Duce laid out the principles of Fascism, and on 3-23-1933, von Hindenberg signed the Enabling Act (or “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation”), taking Hitler from Chancellor to Führer with a flick of the pen. On 3-23-1983, Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” program, and on 3-23-1989, Pons and Fleischman announced they’d achieved cold fusion at room temperature. In the following months, the Power Elite (on which note, seasons 1 and 2 of the BBC’s The Tripods dropped today on DVD) employed folks like Steven E. Jones, who’s been pushing the thermate-driven collapse of Towers 1 and 2 red herring for the past several years, to launch a coordinated assault on Pons and Fleischman’s research, effectively discrediting claims of excess heat. On 3-23-06 the Federal Reserve announced it would no longer bother to publish the M3 report, and so forth.
Today, my war trumpets were purified in that I vanquished a sore throat; and, though I didn’t personally sacrifice an ewe, I did eat a gyro.
Today also kicks off the five-day Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and I suspect that combat is central to most of the games being developed. Alaska’s Mount Redoubt also erupted five times between last night and this morning; the volcano was apparently confused, as the May 23 Tubilustrium is the one dedicated to Vulcan.
Happy birthday to H. Beam Piper, Akira Kurosawa, Wernher von Braun, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the other El Duce (the one from The Mentors) and, to all yinz all, cuídate!
