Parentalia: Feeding the Family Dead

The roads out of Rome are lined with the dead.

Roman law prohibited burial within the city walls, which means that every road leading out of every Roman city is flanked by tombs. The rich have elaborate mausoleums — columbarium niches for urns, carved sarcophagi, monuments with portraits and inscriptions. The poor have simpler markers. Some graves have pipes running down into them, so that liquid offerings can be poured directly to the buried dead. The road from Rome to the Alban Hills, the Via Appia, is the most famous: mile after mile of sepulchral monuments, the dead lining the road the living use, the boundary between them marked by the city wall and maintained by the law.

For nine days in February, the boundary becomes permeable.

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Parentalia begins on February 13th and runs to the 21st.

During these nine days, the ordinary business of Roman public life suspends. The temple doors are closed — or rather, the temples are open, but no sacrificial fires burn, no magistrates perform official functions. The magistrates, when they appear in public during Parentalia, do not wear the fasces — the bundle of rods and axe that marks their office — or the purple-striped toga of official function. They appear as private citizens, because this is a festival for private families and their private dead, not for the state and its public gods.

Marriages are prohibited during Parentalia. The sources explain this: the Di Parentales — the ancestral spirits — are present, and beginning a marriage during their presence would mix the living-forward energy of a marriage with the dead-backward energy of the festival in ways that would be bad for both.

Each family goes to its tombs.

They bring roses and violets — the flowers associated with the dead — and garlands. They bring food and wine, often a simple meal: bread soaked in wine, grain scattered on the ground, a small cake, salt. They pour wine over the tomb or down the offering-tube if one is present. They speak to the dead. They eat with the dead. The meal is shared between the living and the ancestral spirits, who are present at the tomb in a way they are not present the rest of the year.

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Ovid tells a story about what happens when the offerings are neglected.

During the Punic Wars — he says; Livy gives a more specific reference to after Cannae — Rome was so consumed by military emergency that the Parentalia observances were allowed to lapse. The offerings were not made. The families did not go to the tombs.

The dead responded.

The shades rose from the graves. They wandered through the city and the surrounding countryside. People heard them crying and mourning and, Ovid says, shrieking — the ghosts’ voices in the night streets of Rome. Women died in large numbers. The crops failed. These are signs. Signs that the dead have been neglected, that the reciprocal relationship has broken down, that the living side of the contract has not been honored.

The offerings were resumed. The dead quieted. The relationship was restored.

Ovid draws the explicit lesson: By meager gifts the spirits of the dead are pleased; a tile wreathed with garlands given in piety is enough. A little salted spelt and scattered grain, a little wine soaked in bread, these are the due of the dead.

This is the economy of Roman ancestor religion: the dead do not require much. They require attention, regularity, the acknowledgment that they are still present, still capable of affecting the living, still owed the relationship. The worst thing is not giving too little. The worst thing is giving nothing, forgetting, treating the dead as gone rather than as present.

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The Parentalia ends on February 21st with the Feralia, a day of general propitiation of the dead.

Then, on February 22nd, everything reverses: the Caristia, or Cara Cognatio — the feast of dear kinship. Families gather, living only, to eat together and reconcile any quarrels. The point is made explicitly by ancient commentators: you have just fed the dead; now feed the living. You have just maintained the bond with the past; now maintain the bond with the present. The festival cycle of February moves from the dead backward through the living forward, the whole relationship between generations acknowledged in a single liturgical week.

The dead are not gone. They are in the tombs on the roads outside every Roman city, waiting for February and the violets and the wine soaked in bread. As long as you bring them, they are satisfied. As long as they are satisfied, you are safe.

That is the whole theology. It is enough.