PARENTALIA. — In the ancient Roman religion, this was the name given to a series of days beginning on 13 February and ending on the 21st of the same month. While the latter day is also marked in the Archaic Calendar as a public festival (Feralia), documentation for the Parentalia or dies parentales does not go back to very ancient times; this, however, does not exclude the antiquity of the celebration, at least in private, of the festive cycle, given that the Archaic Calendar marks only the culminating, strictly festive, days of the public festive cycles.
In the private sphere, the celebration consisted of funeral rites dedicated to the deceased, conceived as gods (di parentes: the ancestors as gods), almost as an annual renewal of burial rites. But it was a public cult act that marked the beginning of the cycle: in the Calendar of Philocalus (4th century AD) 13 February bears the note “Virgo Vestalis parentat.” This notice has been linked to another, more ancient one, according to which the Vestal performed funeral 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, instead, are dies religiosi, entailing the closing of temples, the prohibition of marriages, and, for magistrates, the forbidding of wearing the insignia of their offices; this is due to contact with the world of the dead, under whose sign the entire month of February, the last of the archaic Roman Calendar, unfolds.