ARGEI. - In Roman worship this name denoted two different things:
1) shrines, 27 (or 24) in number, distributed throughout the Rome "of the four regions" and which later became centers of the widespread tributary cult compiled for the protecting divinities of the compita or "crossroads of the streets into which the city was divided," a cult that was revived to new life by Augustus: on March 17 a procession was held there;
2) wicker effigies, which on May 15 the Vestals threw into the Tiber from the Sublician bridge, in the presence of the pontiffs. It was a ceremony of profoundly expiatory character (Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 86), to which mythographic explanations fail to give an exhaustive meaning.
The most persuasive explanation is suggested by religious ethnology, which sees in it a sacred-magical rite for provoking rain: a rite that can be considered as a substitute for another very ancient one, in which not effigies but living men, perhaps the elders of the community, were sacrificed for that purpose (Festus, s. v. Sevagenarias de ponte; Ovid, Fast., V, 621-62). The name a., that is, Argives and therefore Greeks, may have come to the effigies from the fact that, subsequently, the elders were replaced by prisoners of war; and, given the mythical origin of the Romans from Troy, these prisoners would have been called Argives, who were the enemies par excellence of the Trojans (G. Wissowa, G. De Sanctis). The rite was state-sponsored, as is demonstrated by the presence of the pontiffs and the Vestals, and by the fact that the a. were closely associated with the compital shrines of the old city.
Bibliography3 works
Nicola Turchi