PALES AND PARILIA. - The *Parilia* festival on April 21 is already recorded in the most ancient Roman festal calendar. According to all the best authorities, this festival was sacred to the deity Pales, from whom it also took its name (the linguistic possibility of the derivation, despite the change of a consonant, is ensured by the analogy of *caelum-caeruleus*). Only linguistic considerations led some ancient authors either to change the name of the festival to *Palilia* or to detach it from the divine name, deriving it from the verb *parere*, "to give birth."
In literary tradition, Pales appears predominantly as the goddess of shepherds. There are, however, some testimonies according to which Pales would have been a male deity. Martianus Capella finally mentions two Pales, and his testimony, which might otherwise be suspect, gains credibility from an annotation in the pre-Caesarean calendar found at Anzio, according to which July 7 was sacred to the two Pales (*PALIB. II*). A temple was dedicated to Pales by Attilius Regulus, at the deity's own prompting, on the occasion of his victory over the Sallentines. This is about all that can be said with certainty about the deity itself.
As for the festival, it was, according to explicit testimony, of both public and private character, that is, celebrated both by the State as such and by private individuals. In the private sphere, it had a pastoral character, in that its ceremonies were intended to purify the stables and livestock. This purificatory character also dominates the public festival, but in a different aspect: it was, in fact, the purification of the entire Roman population. The means used for this purification is called *sufimen* and is composed of the following ingredients: the ashes of the fetus taken from the pregnant cow sacrificed at the *Pordicidia*, the blood of the *October equus* sacrificed to Mars on the 15th of October—both preserved by the Vestal Virgins—and bean stalks. Another purificatory rite was performed in that the participants leapt through a bonfire and were sprinkled with water.
The greatest historical interest of the festival lies in the fact that, at least from the first half of the 1st century B.C. (to which the aforementioned Anzio calendar dates), it was conceived as the anniversary of the founding of Rome (hence, even today, the Natale di Roma on the same date). The reason for this tradition did not lie certainly in the astronomical calculations that, in the time of Varro, were probably undertaken more to justify an existing tradition than to establish a new one, nor solely in the legendary material connected with the festival, but in the sacred character of the festival and of the deity, which can be inferred from several elements such as the extraordinary composition of the *sufimen*, the participation of the most important priests, the character of New Year's Day attributed to the date, the ambiguity of the deity's gender, etc.
