PALES AND PARILIA. - The Parilia festival of April 21 already appears in the most ancient Roman festal 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). Linguistic considerations alone induce some ancient authors either to change the name of the festival to Palilia or to wish to detach it from the divine name, deriving it from the verb parere, "to give birth."
In the literary tradition Pales appears predominantly as the goddess of shepherds. There are, however, some testimonies according to which Pales would have been a male divinity. Martianus Capella, finally, recalls two Pales, and his testimony, which moreover could be suspect, acquires value from an annotation of the pre-Caesarian calendar found at Anzio, according to which July 7 would have been sacred to the two Pales (PALIB. II). A temple was dedicated to Pales by Atilius Regulus, at the invitation of the divinity itself, on the occasion of the victory over the Salientini. This is more or less all that can concretely be said about the divinity itself.
As for the festival, it is, according to an explicit testimony, of both a public and a private character, that is to say celebrated both by the State as such and by private individuals. In the private sphere it has a pastoral character, inasmuch as its ceremonies have the purpose of purifying the flocks and the livestock. This lustratory character also dominates in the public festival, but under a different aspect: it is, in fact, the purification of the entire Roman population. The means used for this purification is called suffimen and is composed of the following ingredients: the ash 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 October 15 - both preserved by the Vestals - and husks of beans. Another purificatory rite is performed in that the participants leap through a pyre and are sprinkled with water.
The greatest historical interest of the festival consists in the fact that it, at least from the first half of the 1st century B.C., to which the aforementioned calendar of Anzio dates, was conceived as the anniversary of the founding of Rome (hence, even today, the Natale di Roma on the same date). The reason for the existence of this tradition certainly did not lie in the astronomical calculations which, in the age of Varro, were probably undertaken more to justify an existing tradition than to found a new one, nor only in the legendary material connected with the festival, but in the sacral character of this festival and of the divinity, which barely transpires from certain elements such as the extraordinary composition of the suffimen, the participation of the most important priests, the character of New Year attributed to the date, the ambiguity of the sex of the divinity, etc.
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Angelo Brelich