February First Fruits & Quirinalia
To highlight just how different the seasonal cycle is depending on latitude, mid-February, the last ides period of the ritual year in Rome, was a festival of the first-fruit offerings. While here in Vermont we are barely thinking about the growing season, never mind able to see actual earth, during the Roman-era Parentalia, the first grains to be harvested were tied into sheaves or baked into coarse breads and offered to Ceres, the Roman equivalent of Demeter. This was such an essential obligation for all households that entry into the temples had to be scheduled by neighborhood — the curiae, part tax-district, part family bloodline — one day for each curia.
However, bureaucracy being what it is, through time, many people fell into the edge spaces, not knowing what curia they belonged to properly. For those households who could not determine their place, there was Quirinalia, beginning at sundown on 16 February, also known as the Feast of Fools because these people did not know who they were and how they related to social structures. On Quirinalia, the edge folks brought their offerings to Ceres and therefore at least made themselves right by the goddess of growth and harvest.
Ceres is the deity that is honored in this festival, however it is named for Quirinus, the deity that Rome’s founder Romulus became when he was snatched up from the Earth in a sudden thunderstorm (presumably by Jupiter). Quirinus is a god of war. Romulus, himself, was a son of Mars, the ancient deity of agriculture turned war-god. Quirinus dispensed with the seedy roots of Mars and represented the martial power of Rome with none of the older ties to the Earth. Still… the festival of Quirinus was ritually marked with offerings of food to Ceres.
For those who like roots… the etymology of Quirinus is particularly juicy. Here is what Wikipedia says on the subject:
The name Quirīnus probably stems from Latin quirīs, the name of Roman citizens in their peacetime function. Since both quirīs and Quirīnus are connected with Sabellic immigrants into Rome in ancient legends, it may be a loanword. The meaning "wielder of the spear" (Sabine quiris, 'spear', cf. Janus Quirinus), or a derivation from the Sabine town of Cures, have been proposed by Ovid in his Fasti 2.477-480.
Some scholars have interpreted the name as a contraction of *Co-Virīnus (originally the protector of the community, cf. cūria < *co-viria), descending from an earlier *Co-Wironos, itself from the Proto-Indo-European noun *wihₓrós ("man"). Linguist Michiel de Vaan argues that this etymology "is not credible phonetically and not very compelling semantically."
Michiel de Vaan’s expert opinion notwithstanding, one can see a clear folk etymology between the name of Rome’s founding deity, Quirinus, and the concept of bloodline and proper belonging, curiae. This belonging was more than simply relation to humans; it was bound up with the soil of the place where a family was rooted. So while Quirinus seems to be purely a man of war made immortal, he has strong ties to the land, to food, to nourishment and to physical roots. To life.
I often wonder who average Romans were honoring — especially those whose convoluted history had severed them from ancestral homelands, those who made their first fruit offerings on Quirinalia — the god who protected through military might or the god who preserved through the plow. It must at least have been satisfyingly delicious irony for all those who spent their days toiling to feed the Roman military machine that the progenitor of the empire had such a double-edged name.
Many lessons in there for this latter-day empire, don’t you think?
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 