October Horse

In ancient Roman religion, the October Horse was an animal sacrifice to Mars carried out on October 15, coinciding with the end of the agricultural and military campaigning season. The rite took place during one of three horse-racing festivals held in honor of Mars, the others being the two Equirria on February 27 and March 14.
Two-horse chariot races were held in the Campus Martius, the area of Rome named for Mars, after which the right-hand horse of the winning team was transfixed by a spear, then sacrificed. The horse's head and tail were cut off and used separately in the two subsequent parts of the ceremonies: two neighborhoods staged a fight for the right to display the head, and the freshly bloodied cauda was carried to the Regia for sprinkling the sacred hearth of Rome.
Ancient references to the Equus October are scattered over more than six centuries: the earliest is that of Timaeus, who linked the sacrifice to the Trojan Horse and the Romans' claim to Trojan descent, with the latest in the Calendar of Philocalus, where it is noted as still occurring, even as Christianity was becoming the dominant religion of the Empire. Most scholars see an Etruscan influence on the early formation of the ceremonies.
The October Horse is the only instance of horse sacrifice in Roman religion; the Romans typically sacrificed animals that were a normal part of their diet. The unusual ritual of the October Horse has thus been analyzed at times in light of other Indo-European forms of horse sacrifice, such as the Vedic ashvamedha and the Irish ritual described by Giraldus Cambrensis, both of which have to do with kingship. Although the ritual battle for possession of the head may preserve an element from the early period when Rome was ruled by kings, the October Horse's collocation of agriculture and war is characteristic of the Republic. The sacred topography of the rite and the role of Mars in other equestrian festivals also suggest aspects of youth initiation and rebirth ritual. The complex or even contradictory aspects of the October Horse probably result from overlays of traditions accumulated over time.

Description

The rite of the October Horse took place on the Ides of October, but no name is recorded for a festival on that date. The grammarian Festus describes it as follows:

The October Horse is named from the annual sacrifice to Mars in the Campus Martius during the month of October. It is the right-hand horse of the winning team in the two-horse chariot races. The customary competition for its head between the residents of the Suburra and those of the Sacra Via was no trivial affair; the latter would get to attach it to the wall of the Regia, or the former to the Mamilian Tower. Its tail was transported to the Regia with sufficient speed that the blood from it could be dripped onto the hearth for the sake of becoming part of the sacred rite '.

In a separate passage, the Augustan antiquarian Verrius Flaccus adds the detail that the horse's head is adorned with bread. The Calendar of Philocalus notes that on October 15 "the Horse takes place at the Nixae," either an altar to birth deities ' or less likely an obscure landmark called the Ciconiae Nixae. According to Roman tradition, the Campus Martius had been consecrated to Mars by their ancestors as horse pasturage and an equestrian training ground for youths.
The "sacred rite" that the horse's blood became part of is usually taken to be the Parilia, a festival of rural character on April 21, which became the date on which the founding of Rome was celebrated.

War and agriculture

Verrius Flaccus notes that the horse ritual was carried out ob frugum eventum, usually taken to mean "in thanks for the completed harvest" or "for the sake of the next harvest", since winter wheat was sown in the fall. The phrase has been connected to the divine personification Bonus Eventus, "Good Outcome," who had a temple of unknown date in the Campus Martius and whom Varro lists as one of the twelve agricultural deities. But like other ceremonies in October, the sacrifice occurred during the time of the army's return and reintegration into society, for which Verrius also accounted by explaining that a horse is suited for war, an ox for tilling. The Romans did not use horses as draft animals for farm work, nor chariots in warfare, but Polybius specifies that the victim is a war horse.
The ritual was held outside the pomerium, Rome's sacred boundary, presumably because of its martial character. But agriculture was also an extra-urban activity, as Vitruvius indicates when he notes that the correct sacred place for Ceres was outside the city . In Rome's early history, the roles of soldier and farmer were complementary:

In early Rome agriculture and military activity were closely bound up, in the sense that the Roman farmer was also a soldier. … In the case of the October Horse, for example, we should not be trying to decide whether it is a military, or an agricultural festival; but see it rather as one of the ways in which the convergence of farming and warfare might be expressed.

This polyvalence was characteristic of the god for whom the sacrifice was conducted, since among the Romans Mars brought war and bloodshed, agriculture and virility, and thus both death and fertility within his sphere of influence.

The Parilia and ''suffimen''

The Augustan poets Propertius and Ovid both mention horse as an ingredient in the ritual preparation suffimen or suffimentum, which the Vestals compounded for use in the lustration of shepherds and their sheep at the Parilia. Propertius may imply that this horse was not an original part of the preparation: "the purification rites ' are now renewed by means of the dismembered horse". Ovid specifies that the horse's blood was used for the suffimen. While the blood from the tail was dripped or smeared on the sacred hearth of Rome in October, blood or ashes from the rest of the animal could have been processed and preserved for the suffimen as well. Although no other horse sacrifice in Rome is recorded, Georges Dumézil and others have attempted to exclude the Equus October as the source of equine blood for the Parilia.
Another important ingredient for the suffimen was the ash produced from the holocaust of an unborn calf at the Fordicidia on April 15, along with the stalks from which beans had been harvested. One source, from late antiquity and not always reliable, notes that beans were sacred to Mars.
Suffimentum is a general word for a preparation used for healing, purification, or warding off ill influence. In his treatise on veterinary medicine, Vegetius recommends a suffimentum as an effective cure for draft animals and for humans prone to emotional outbursts, as well as for driving off hailstorms, demons and ghosts '.

The victim

were most often domestic animals normally part of the Roman diet, and the meat was eaten at a banquet shared by those celebrating the rite. Horse meat was distasteful to the Romans, and Tacitus classes horses among "profane" animals. Inedible victims such as the October Horse and dogs were typically offered to chthonic deities in the form of a holocaust, resulting in no shared meal. In Greece, dog sacrifices were made to Mars' counterpart Ares and the related war god Enyalios. At Rome, dogs were sacrificed at the Robigalia, a festival for protecting the crops at which chariot races were held for Mars along with the namesake deity, and at a very few other public rites. Birth deities, however, also received offerings of puppies or bitches, and infant cemeteries show a high concentration of puppies, sometimes ritually dismembered. Inedible victims were offered to a restricted group of deities mainly involved with the cycle of birth and death, but the reasoning is obscure.
The importance of the horse to the war god is likewise not self-evident, since the Roman military was based on infantry. Mars' youthful armed priests the Salii, attired as "typical representatives of the archaic infantry," performed their rituals emphatically on foot, with dance steps. The equestrian order was of lesser social standing than the senatorial patres, "fathers", who were originally the patricians only. The Magister equitum, "Master of the Horse," was subordinate to the Dictator, who was forbidden the use of the horse except through special legislation. By the late Republic, the Roman cavalry was formed primarily from allies ', and Arrian emphasizes the foreign origin of cavalry training techniques, particularly among the Celts of Gaul and Spain. Roman technical terms pertaining to horsemanship and horse-drawn vehicles are mostly not Latin in origin, and often from Gaulish.
Under some circumstances, Roman religion placed the horse under an explicit ban. Horses were forbidden in the grove of Diana Nemorensis, and the patrician Flamen Dialis was religiously prohibited from riding a horse. Mars, however, was associated with horses at his Equirria festivals and the equestrian "Troy Game", which was one of the events Augustus staged for the dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor in 2 BC.
Horse sacrifice was regularly offered by peoples the Romans classified as "barbarians," such as Scythians, but also at times by Greeks. In Macedonia, "horses in armor" were sacrificed as a lustration for the army. Immediately after describing the October Horse, Festus gives three other examples: the Spartans sacrifice a horse "to the winds" on Mount Taygetus; among the Sallentini, horses were burnt alive for an obscure Jove Menzana; and every year the Rhodians dedicated a four-horse chariot ' to the Sun and cast it into the sea. The quadriga traditionally represented the sun, as the biga did the moon. A Persian horse-sacrifice to "Hyperion clothed in rays of light" was noted by Ovid and Greek sources.
In contrast to cultures that offered a horse to the war god in advance to ask for success, the Roman horse sacrifice marked the close of the military campaigning season. Among the Romans, horse- and chariot-races were characteristic of "old and obscure" religious observances such as the Consualia that at times propitiated chthonic deities. The horse races at the shadowy Taurian Games in honor of the underworld gods were held in the Campus Martius as were Mars' Equirria. The horse had been established as a funerary animal among the Greeks and Etruscans by the Archaic period. Hendrik Wagenvoort even speculated about an archaic form of Mars who "had been imagined as the god of death and the underworld in the shape of a horse."