OCTO´BER EQUUS
OCTO´BER EQUUS On the Ides of October in each year
there was a race of
bigae in the Campus
Martius, after which the off-horse of the winning biga was sacrificed by the
flamen Martialis at the altar of Mars: the tail was cut (
offa penita, Arnob. 7.24: cf. Plaut.
Mil.
Glor. 3.1, 165; and
curto equo,
Prop. 5.1,
20) and,
taken to the Regia, the blood from it sprinkled on the hearth of Vesta: the
blood from the sacrificed horse was kept and stored up within the Regia, for
future sacred rites [
PARILIA].
For the head of the victim there was a struggle between the inhabitants of
the Via Sacra and those of the Subura: if the former got it, it was fixed on
the walls of the, Regia; it the latter, on the
turris
Mamilia in the Subura. This struggle, representing a
competition between two halves of the old city, marks the festival as dating
from the earliest beginning of Rome (Mommsen,
Hist. of Rome,
1.53; Burn,
Rome and Campagna, p. 38). Marquardt sees also in
the struggle a form of lustration or expiation, comparing Lobeck,
Aglaoph. 680. The horse was clearly the appropriate
sacrifice to Mars (to whom also the Equiria were sacred), and the fact that
the blood was reserved for another ancient lustral rite suggests that we
have here the original purely Roman lustration. (See also Marquardt,
Staatsverwaltung, 3.334 f.)
[
G.E.M]