PALE and PARILIA. – The festival Parilia of 21 April already appears in the most ancient Roman festival calendar. According to all the best authorities, this festival was sacred to the divinity Pales, from whom it also took its name (the linguistic possibility of the derivation, despite the change of one consonant, is guaranteed by the analogy of caelum-caerulens). Only linguistic considerations have led some ancient authors either to alter the name of the festival to Palilia or to dissociate it from the divine name, deriving it from the verb parere, “to give birth.”
In the literary tradition Pale appears predominantly as the goddess of shepherds. There are, however, some testimonies according to which Pale was a male divinity. Martianus Capella, finally, recalls two Pales, and his testimony—which might, moreover, be suspect—gains in value from a note in the pre-Caesarean calendar discovered at Anzio, according to which 7 July was sacred to the two Pales (PALIB. II). A temple was dedicated to Pale by Atilius Regulus, at the divinity’s own bidding, on the occasion of the victory over the Salientini. This is more or less all that can concretely be said concerning the divinity herself.
As for the festival, according to explicit testimony it was both public and private in character, that is, celebrated both by the State as such and by private individuals. In the private sphere it had a pastoral character, since its ceremonies were intended to purify the shoulders and the livestock. This lustral character also predominated in the
public festival, but under a different aspect: it concerned, in fact, the purification of the entire Roman population. The means used for this purification was called suffimen and consisted of the following ingredients: the ashes of the fetus extracted from the pregnant cow sacrificed at the Pordicidia, the blood of the october equus sacrificed to Mars at the festival of 15 October—both preserved by the Vestals—and bean husks. Another purificatory rite was performed by the participants’ leaping through a bonfire and being sprinkled with water.
The festival’s greatest historical interest lies in the fact that, at least from the first half of the first century B.C., to which the aforementioned calendar of Anzio dates, it was understood as the anniversary of the foundation of Rome (hence, even today, the Natale di Roma on the same date). The raison d’être of this tradition certainly did not lie in the astronomical calculations which, in Varro’s time, were probably undertaken more to justify an existing tradition than to establish a new one, nor solely in the legendary material associated with the festival, but in the sacred character of the festival and of the divinity—one that is scarcely perceptible except in certain elements, such as the extraordinary composition of the suffimen, the participation of the most important priests, the New Year character attributed to the date, the ambiguity of the divinity’s sex, etc.