Mamuralia
In ancient Roman religion, the Mamuralia or Sacrum Mamurio ("Rite for Mamurius") was a festival held on March 14 or 15, named only in sources from late antiquity.
The ancile was one of the sacred guarantors of the Roman state (pignora imperii),[2] and the replicas were intended to conceal the identity of the original and so prevent its theft; it was thus a kind of "public secret.
As payment, Mamurius requested that his name be preserved and remembered in the song sung by the Salii, the Carmen Saliare, as they executed movements with the shields and performed their armed dance.
Mamurius in this view was associated with Februarius, the month of purifications and care of the dead that originally ended the year, and represented concepts of lustration, rites of passage, and liminality.
He also places the causative verb monêre, "to warn, advise, remind," in this same group, explaining that the verbal action is meant to create a memory or monimenta, "monument(s)."
[18] Plutarch, in an extended passage on the shields in his Life of Numa, also notes that Mamurius was invoked by the Salii, but that "some say" the phrase means not the name, but veterem memoriam, an "ancient remembrance.
"[19] William Warde Fowler, in his 1899 work on Roman festivals, agreed with Mommsen that the story of Mamurius might be "one of those comparatively rare examples of later ritual growing itself out of myth."
[23] The lateness of this account has raised questions about the festival's authenticity or antiquity, since references in Republican and Imperial calendars or literary sources are absent or oblique.
[27] The calendar mosaic from El Djem, Tunisia (Roman Africa), which places March as the first month, shows three men using sticks to beat an animal hide.
Lydus's understanding of Mamurius may be connected to medieval lore of the wodewose or wild man of the wood, who could play a similar role in winter or new year ceremonies pertaining to Twelfth Night and carnival.
According to Pomponio Leto, the Italian humanist, the statue and "Mamurius's neighborhood" (Vicus Mamuri) were at the Church of S. Susanna on the Quirinal Hill, though the regionary catalogues locate it nearer the Capitolium Vetus.
