Robigalia

[1] The Robigalia was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season,[2] but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and the dependence on divine favor to avert it.

[10] Like many other aspects of Roman law and religion, the institution of the Robigalia was attributed to the Sabine Numa Pompilius,[11] in the eleventh year of his reign as the second king of Rome.

Both Robigus and robigo are also found as Rubig- which, following the etymology-by-association of antiquity,[20] was thought to be connected to the color red (ruber) as a form of homeopathic or sympathetic magic.

[23] William Warde Fowler, whose work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference,[24] entertained the idea that Robigus is an "indigitation" of Mars, that is, a name to be used in a prayer formulary to fix the local action of the invoked god.

[26] The flamen recited a prayer that Ovid quotes at length in the Fasti, his six-book calendar poem on Roman holidays which provides the most extended, though problematic, description of the day.