Compitalia
also called
Ludi Compitalicii. A festival celebrated once a year in
honour of the two Lares Compitales, to whom sacrifices were offered at the places where two or
more ways met (
compita). Dionysius (iv. 14) similarly ascribes its origin
to Servius Tullius, and describes the festival as it was celebrated in his time. He relates
that the sacrifices consisted of honey-cakes (
πέλανοι), which
were presented by the inhabitants of each house, and that the persons who assisted as
ministering servants at the festival were not freemen, but slaves, because the Lares took
pleasure in the service of slaves. He further adds that the Compitalia were celebrated a few
days after the Saturnalia with great splendour, and that the slaves on this occasion had full
liberty given them to do what they pleased. We are told by Macrobius (
Saturn.
i. 7, 34) that the celebration of the Compitalia was restored by Tarquinius Superbus, who
sacrificed boys to Mania, the mother of the Lares; but this practice was changed after the
expulsion of the Tarquins, and the heads of garlic and poppies were offered instead of human
heads.
The persons who presided over the festival were the
magistri vicorum.
Public games were added at some time during the republican period to this festival, but were
suppressed by command of the Senate in B.C. 64. Yet that the festival itself still continued
to be observed, though the games were abolished, is evident from Cicero (
ad
Att. iii. 3). When Iulius Caesar dissolved most of the
collegia,
the Compitalia necessarily fell into disuse. Augustus restored the festival on an entirely new
basis, not reviving the
collegia, but assigning the charge of it to a
newly constituted set of
magistri vicorum. To the two Lares Compitales
was now added the
genius Augusti (Ovid,
Fast. v. 145), and the festival was observed twice in the year, on May
1 and August 1. At an earlier time the Compitalia belonged to the
feriae
conceptivae; that is, festivals which were celebrated on days appointed annually by the
magistrates or priests. The day on which this festival was celebrated appears to have been
always in the winter.
