ANNA PERENNA. - Ancient Roman divinity, about whose festival, which fell on the Ides of March, we are amply informed by the Fasti (V, 523-695) of Ovid, who dwells on the burlesque side that the festival had acquired among the common people of the City.
The meaning of the festival and the character of the goddess are fairly transparent, when one takes into account only the essential and primitive religious features. A. P. is a goddess of a nature character, who presides over the fertility of the soil throughout the year, and is therefore synonymous with Annona (unless one wishes to consider this a mere personification of the annona). The festival fell at the beginning of the ancient Roman year: like all calendars of agricultural peoples, the beginning of the year was connected with the spring rebirth after the winter standstill. It took place in a grove and had a cheerful and partly licentious character: two traits constantly linked with the rites that tend to provoke the fertility of the soil. The adjective perenna is synonymous with perennis and indicates the perennial vitality of nature, despite the apparent winter death. Through an understandable psychological process, the urban plebs later asked the goddess to annare et perannare, that is, to prosper throughout the year and to survive until the following year; but it is not excluded that the goddess had this character of a divinity of the annual return from the very beginning. All the other explanations, however, that Ovid reports, are of a nature too evidently erudite and late to be taken into consideration.
Bibliography
Paolino Mingazzini