ACCA LARENTIA. - According to various ancient authors, but principally Macrobius, she was a woman who lived in the time of Ancus Marcius. The guardian of the temple of Hercules is said to have one day invited the god to a game of dice, on the agreement that the loser would offer the winner a dinner and a woman. The victory was the god's, and he is said to have spent the night in the temple with A. L. and, in gratitude, to have warned the woman not to let slip the first opportunity that presented itself to her upon leaving: that was his gift. And indeed a wealthy Etruscan, Tarutius, struck by her beauty, is said to have married her, leaving her shortly afterward as heir to great riches. A. L., in turn, at her death left the Roman people as her heir; and the king ordained that funeral sacrifices should be performed annually at her tomb in the Velabrum, near the Via Nova. The sacrifices, which took the name Larentalia (v.) or Larentialia, were held on 23 December by the pontiffs and the flamen quirinalis.
From this legend of a popular type and evidently very ancient, since it is connected with a tomb situated in the locality closest to the primitive nucleus of the city and bound up with lands owned by the State, other legendary particulars of evident learned origin must be distinguished. An attempt was made to make A. L. the wife of Faustulus and the nurse of Romulus and Remus, and thus to explain rationalistically the legend of the singular suckling of the two twins (lupa in fact also means prostitute). One of her own sons having died, she is then said to have adopted Romulus in his place and to have instituted the college of the Fratres Arvales; and finally, at her death, she is said to have left Romulus as heir to her property, inherited from Tarutius, whom she had married in second nuptials.
Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain the figure of A. L. symbolically, but each of these runs up against very serious difficulties. So that, after so much learned wandering, the wisest course seems to be to return to the starting point and to be content with what the ancients believed, who saw in A. L. simply a courtesan who really existed - perhaps a couple of centuries later than Ancus Marcius - who, being without relatives, wished to leave her property to the State, on the agreement that funeral rites be celebrated at her tomb, according to a custom most common in all ages and especially in antiquity.