PARCA. - Par(i)ca, from Latin pario = I give birth (the etymologies from parco and partior are to be rejected), is the goddess, conceived at first as a single deity, who presides over birth. The number later became three with the addition of Nona and Decima, the two P. who preside over the two months that close the pregnancy (Varro, in Gellius, III, 6, 10).
The Greek Moirai, who likewise rose from an original single conception to three, caused both the ternary number and the meaning of divinities presiding over the destiny of man (Tria Fata), from birth to death, to become stabilized in Rome as well. The names of the P. in the Latin writers who frequently mention them are the same as those of the Greek Moirai: Clotho who holds the distaff, Lachesis who spins the thread, Atropos who cuts the thread. Catullus (LXIV, 306) represents them as three old women, Virgil (Ecl., IV, 47) as the fixers of fate, Horace (Carmen Saeculare, 25) invites them to foretell good fates for Rome; Apuleius (De mundo, 38) regards them as the three symbols of the past, the present and the unknown future; Servius (ad Aen., I, 26) as those who foretell, write and regulate the course of life.
In Rome the P. had no true cult apart from the sacrifice offered to them, under the Latinized Greek name of moerae, in the Tarentum on the occasion of the Secular Games. They are mentioned in votive inscriptions from the Celtic lands: deabus Parcis (Dessau 3766, 3768); Parcis Augustis (Dessau 3765, 3767); aram Parcabus (Dessau 3769) and in metrical funerary inscriptions where the name P. serves to indicate the fatality of destiny (Dessau, 4414; 5213; 6068; 7759).
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Nicola Turchi