ARGEI. — In Roman worship, this name referred to two different things:
1) shrines, numbering 27 (or 24), distributed throughout the Rome “of the four regions,” which later became centers of the widespread compitalia cult devoted to the protective deities of the compita, or “clusters of streets” into which the city was divided; this cult was revived and given new life by Augustus: a procession was held there on 17 March;
2) wicker effigies which, on 15 May, the Vestals threw into the Tiber from the Sublician Bridge, in the presence of the pontiffs. It was a ceremony of profound expiatory character (Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 86), to which mythographical explanations have been unable to give an exhaustive meaning.
The most persuasive explanation is suggested by religious ethnology, which sees in it a sacred-magical rite intended to bring about rain: a rite that may be regarded as the substitute for another, extremely 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 been given to the effigies because, later on, prisoners of war were substituted for the elders; and, given the mythical origin of the Romans from Troy, these prisoners would have been called Argives, who were the Trojans’ quintessential enemies (G. Wissowa, G. De Sanctis). The rite was public, 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.