October Horse

[2] Two-horse chariot races (bigae) 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.

Although the ritual battle for possession of the head may preserve an element from the early period when Rome was ruled by kings,[5] the October Horse's collocation of agriculture and war is characteristic of the Republic.

[14] The phrase has been connected to the divine personification Bonus Eventus, "Good Outcome,"[15] who had a temple of unknown date in the Campus Martius[16] and whom Varro lists as one of the twelve agricultural deities.

[17] 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.

… 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 (or more accurately of farmers and fighters) might be expressed.

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 (daemones and umbras).

[60] The chariot was part of Roman military culture primarily as the vehicle of the triumphing general, who rode in an ornamented four-horse car markedly impractical for actual war.

[75] Perhaps the most famous scene from the Iliad involving a chariot is Achilles dragging the body of Hector, the Trojan heir to the throne, three times around the tomb of Patroclus; in the version of the Aeneid, it is the city walls that are circled.

The practice may be related to the effigies known as oscilla, figures or faces[87] that Vergil says were hung from pine trees by mask-wearing Ausonian farmers of Trojan descent[88] when they were sowing seed.

This gesture signifies the Genius, the divine embodiment of the vital principle found in each individual conceived of as residing in the head, in some ways comparable to the Homeric thumos or the Latin numen.

[94] Pendants of bread were attached to the head of the Equus October: a portion of the inedible sacrifice was retained for humans and garnished with an everyday food associated with Ceres and Vesta.

At an emergency council of the gods, Mars objects to the removal of the sacred talismans of Trojan Vesta which guarantee the safety of the state,[104] and is indignant that the Romans, destined to rule the world, are starving.

Puzzled at first, as is conventional in receiving an oracle, the Romans then throw down the loaves of bread as weapons against the shields and helmets of the Gauls, causing the enemy to despair of starving Rome into submission.

[108] George Devereux and others have argued that cauda, or οὐρά (oura) in Greek sources, is a euphemism for the penis of the October Horse, which might be expected to contain more blood to drip on the hearth at the Regia towards the preparation of the suffimen.

[112] A phallic-like potency may be attributed to the October Horse's tail without requiring cauda to mean "penis," since the ubiquity of phallic symbols in Roman culture would make euphemism or substitution unnecessary.

[116] Satyrs and sileni, though later characterized as goat-like, in the Archaic period were regularly depicted with equine features, including a prominent horsetail; they were known for uncontrolled sexuality, and are often ithyphallic in art.

[123] It appears notably in the medieval Welsh narrative of Branwen when Efnisien, one of a set of twins, mutilates the horses of the King of Ireland, including cutting "their tails to their backs."

For at that rate we should have to say that all barbarian tribes were descendants of the Trojans, since nearly all of them, or at least the majority, when they are entering on a war or on the eve of a decisive battle sacrifice a horse, divining the issue from the manner in which it falls.

[149] The chariot races and sacrifice take place in the Campus Martius, formerly ager Tarquiniorum, Tarquin land,[150] an alluvial plain along the Tiber that was outside the pomerium, Rome's sacred boundary.

[151] Father Dis was the Roman equivalent of the Greek Plouton (Pluto), and his consort Proserpina (Persephone) embodied the vegetative cycle of growth symbolizing the course of the human soul through birth, death, and rebirth into the afterlife, over which the couple presided in the mysteries.

[155] The October Horse sacrifice for Mars at an altar for birth deities suggests his role as a patron to young warriors who undergo the symbolic rebirth of initiation ritual, a theme also of the equestrian Troy Game.

This collocation of divine functions recalls the annual renewal of the fire of Vesta on March 1, the "birthday" of Mars, when laurel was hung on the Regia and New Year's Day originally was celebrated on the archaic Roman calendar.

Silvanus had an association with Mars dating back to the archaic agricultural prayer preserved by Cato's farming treatise, in which the two are invoked either as one or jointly to protect the health of livestock.

[177] Dumézil argued that the October Horse preserved vestiges of a common Indo-European rite of kingship, evidenced also by the Vedic ashvamedha and the Irish inaugural sacrifice described by Giraldus Cambrensis as taking place in Ulster in the early medieval period.

[180] The head in the ashvamedha, signifying spiritual energy, was reserved as a talisman for the king afterwards; the middle of the horse embodied physical force; and the tail was grasped by the officiant and represented the fertility of livestock.

[181] But no race was involved in the medieval Celtic ritual; the horse, a mare who seems to have been the sexual surrogate of the goddess of sovereignty, was consumed communally by king and people from a cauldron in which he was immersed and inaugurated.

[185] In Homo Necans, Walter Burkert saw the October Horse as a "sacrifice of dissolution" (hence his willingness to entertain the ancient tradition that associated it with the Fall of Troy), and the struggle for the head as an agon, a competitive contest that vents violence and rage, as do funeral games.

His lavish public expenditures, they complained, came at their expense: Instead of raising the army's pay, Caesar was using his newly confiscated wealth for such displays as a silk canopy to shelter spectators at the games he staged.

The true cause I am unable to state, inasmuch as the Sibyl made no utterance and there was no other similar oracle, but at any rate they were sacrificed in the Campus Martius by the pontifices and the priest of Mars, and their heads were set up near the Regia.

The two killings have no common elements other than the site and the display of the heads at the Regia, but the passage has been used as evidence that the flamen of Mars[190] presided over the October Horse as well, even though the officiant is never mentioned in sources that deal explicitly with the Equus.