PARENTALIA. - In the ancient Roman religion this was the name of a series of days that began on February 13 and ended on the 21st of the same month. While this last day is also marked in the archaic Calendar as a public festival (Peralia), the documentation for the P., or dies parentales, does not go back to very ancient times: this, however, does not exclude the antiquity of the celebration, at least the private one, of the festive cycle, given that the archaic Calendar marks only the culminating days, strictly festal, of the public festive cycles.
In the private sphere the celebration consisted of funerary rites dedicated to the deceased, conceived as gods (di parentes: the ancestors as gods), almost as an annual renewal of the burial rites. But it was an act of public cult that marked the beginning of the cycle: in the Calendar of Philocalus (4th century A.D.) February 13 bears the annotation "Virgo Vestalis parentat". This notice has been connected with another, more ancient one, according to which the Vestal performed funerary rites at the tomb of Tarpeia. None of the days between the 13th and the 21st appears as a dies nefastus, that is, as a day whose sacred character does not permit profane activities: all of them, instead, are dies religiosi, entailing the closing of the temples, the prohibition of marriages and, for magistrates, of wearing the insignia of their offices: this because of contact with the world of the dead, in whose sign the whole month of February unfolds, the last of the archaic Roman Calendar.
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Angelo Brelich