Salii

They were twelve patrician youths dressed as archaic warriors with an embroidered tunic, a breastplate, a short red cloak (paludamentum), a sword, and a spiked headdress called an apex.

Each year in March, the Salii made a procession round the city, dancing and singing the Carmen Saliare.

Ovid, who relates the story of Numa and the heavenly ancilia in his Fasti,[1] found the hymn and the Salian rituals outdated and hard to understand.

King Tullus Hostilius is said to have established another collegium of Salii in fulfillment of a vow which he made in the second war with Fidenae and Veii.

The Salii are also given an origin in connection with Dardanus and the Samothracian Di Penates, and the Salius who came to Italy with Evander and in the Aeneid competed in the funeral games of Anchises.

[10] Ancient authors quoted by Maurus Servius Honoratus and Macrobius recorded that Salii had existed at Tibur, Tusculum and Veii even before their creation in Rome.

[28] Wearing the paludamentum and pointed apex of the Salii, these maidens were employed to assist the College of Pontiffs in carrying out sacrifices in the Regia.

[34] Georges Dumézil interpreted the rituals of the Salii as marking the opening and the closing of the yearly war season.

Dumezil views the two groups of Salii — one representing Mars and the other Quirinus — as a dialectic relationship, showing the interdependency of the military and economic functions in Roman society.

[41][42][43] Because the earliest Roman calendar had begun with the month of March, Hermann Usener thought the ceremonies of the ancilia movere were a ritual expulsion of the old year, represented by the mysterious figure of Mamurius Veturius, to make way for the new god Mars, born on March 1.

[44] On the Ides of March, a man ritually named as Mamurius Veturius was beaten with long white sticks in the sacrum Mamurii; in Usener's view, this was a form of scapegoating.

Mamurius was the mythic blacksmith who forged eleven replicas of the original divine shield that had dropped from the sky.