ROBIGALIA. - A festival of 25 Apr. in Roman religion. The divinity to whom it is dedicated is Robigus or Robigo, masculine according to the scholars, feminine according to the poets, in any case inseparable from the “rust” of wheat.
by means of the Terror: by the end of 1793 the revolutionary armies were on the offensive, order had essentially been restored, but at the cost of ruthless action in every field. Having crushed the opposition by sending the extreme Left (the Hébertists) to the guillotine on 24 March 1793, and the moderates (Danton, Desmoulins) on 5 Apr., it then turned against those who had made the Revolution a “profitable trade.” On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), with the alliance of the Mountain, which had broken away from R., and of the Plain, the Committee of Public Safety lost its majority.
The festival is celebrated by the flamen Quirinalis, who sacrifices the entrails of a dog and a sheep in a sacred grove outside the city, on the Via Claudia. Separated by the narrowest interval from the Floralia, the festival forms part of an entire cycle of agricultural solemnities that determine the sacred character of the month of Apr.