stamp from
Roman Gaul (Musée de la Céramique de Lezoux) Sacrificial victims were most often domestic animals normally part of the Roman diet, and the meat was eaten at a banquet shared by those celebrating the rite.
Horse meat was distasteful to the Romans, and
Tacitus classes horses among "
profane" animals. Inedible victims such as the October Horse and dogs were typically offered to
chthonic deities in the form of a
holocaust, resulting in no shared meal. In Greece, dog sacrifices were made to Mars'
counterpart Ares and the related war god
Enyalios. At Rome, dogs were sacrificed at the
Robigalia, a festival for protecting the crops at which chariot races were held for Mars along with the namesake deity, and at a very few other public rites. Birth deities, however, also received offerings of puppies or bitches, and infant cemeteries show a high concentration of puppies, sometimes ritually dismembered. Inedible victims were offered to a restricted group of deities mainly involved with the cycle of birth and death, but the reasoning is obscure. The importance of the horse to the war god is likewise not self-evident, since the Roman military was based on infantry. Mars' youthful armed priests the
Salii, attired as "typical representatives of the archaic infantry," performed their rituals emphatically on foot, with dance steps. The
equestrian order was of
lesser social standing than the senatorial
patres, "fathers", who were originally the
patricians only. The
Magister equitum, "Master of the Horse," was subordinate to the
Dictator, who was forbidden the use of the horse except through special legislation. By the late Republic, the Roman cavalry was formed primarily from allies
(auxilia), and
Arrian emphasizes the foreign origin of cavalry training techniques, particularly among the
Celts of
Gaul and
Spain. Roman technical terms pertaining to horsemanship and horse-drawn vehicles are mostly not Latin in origin, and often from
Gaulish. Under some circumstances, Roman religion placed the horse under an explicit ban. Horses were forbidden in the grove of
Diana Nemorensis, and the patrician
Flamen Dialis was religiously prohibited from riding a horse. Mars, however, was associated with horses at his
Equirria festivals and the equestrian
"Troy Game", which was one of the events
Augustus staged for the dedication of the
Temple of Mars Ultor in 2 BC. Horse sacrifice was regularly offered by peoples the Romans classified as "
barbarians," such as
Scythians, but also at times by Greeks. In
Macedonia, "horses in armor" were sacrificed as a lustration for the army. Immediately after describing the October Horse, Festus gives three other examples: the
Spartans sacrifice a horse "to
the winds" on
Mount Taygetus; among the Sallentini, horses were burnt alive for an obscure
Jove Menzana; and every year the
Rhodians dedicated a four-horse chariot
(quadriga) to the Sun and cast it into the sea. The
quadriga traditionally represented the sun, as the
biga did the moon. A Persian horse-sacrifice to "
Hyperion clothed in rays of light" was noted by Ovid and Greek sources. In contrast to cultures that offered a horse to the war god in advance to ask for success, the Roman horse sacrifice marked the close of the military campaigning season. Among the Romans, horse- and chariot-races were characteristic of "old and obscure" religious observances such as the
Consualia that at times propitiated chthonic deities. The horse races at the shadowy
Taurian Games in honor of the underworld gods
(di inferi) were held in the Campus Martius as were Mars' Equirria. The horse had been established as a funerary animal among the Greeks and Etruscans by the Archaic period.
Hendrik Wagenvoort even speculated about an archaic form of Mars who "had been imagined as the god of death and the underworld in the shape of a horse."
The chariot The two-horse
chariot races
(bigae) that preceded the October Horse sacrifice determined the selection of the optimal victim. In a dual yoke, the right-hand horse was the lead or strongest animal, and thus the one from the winning chariot was chosen as the most potent offering for Mars. Chariots have a rich symbolism in Roman culture, but the Romans never used chariots in war, though they faced enemies who did. 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. Most Roman racing practices were of Etruscan origin, part of the Etruscan tradition of public games
(ludi) and
equestrian processions. Chariot racing was imported from
Magna Graecia no earlier than the 6th century BC. , outside
Porta San Sebastiano, Rome Images of chariot races were considered good luck, but the races themselves were magnets for
magic in attempts to influence the outcome. One law from the
Theodosian Code, published in AD 438, prohibits charioteers from using magic to win, on pain of death. Some of the ornaments placed on horses were good-luck charms or devices to ward off malevolence, including bells, wolves' teeth, crescents, and
brands. This counter-magic was directed at actual practices; binding spells
(defixiones) have been found at race tracks. The
defixio sometimes employed the spirits of the prematurely dead to work harm. On
Greek racetracks, the turning posts were heroes' tombs or altars for propitiating
malevolent spirits who might cause harm to the men or horses. The design of the turning posts
(metae) on a Roman race course was derived from Etruscan funerary monuments.
Pliny attributes the invention of the two-horse chariot to the "
Phrygians", an ethnic designation that the Romans came to regard as synonymous with "Trojan." In the Greek narrative tradition, chariots played a role in
Homeric warfare, reflecting their importance among the historical
Mycenaeans. By the time the Homeric epics were composed, however, fighting from chariot was no longer a part of Greek warfare, and the
Iliad has warriors taking chariots as transportation to the battlefield, then fighting on foot. Chariot racing was a part of funeral games quite early, as the first reference to a chariot race in
Western literature is as an event in the funeral games held for
Patroclus in the
Iliad. 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. Variations of the scene occur throughout Roman funerary art. , dragging the body of Hector, with a winged figure above
Gregory Nagy sees horses and chariots, and particularly the chariot of Achilles, as embodying the concept of
ménos, which he defines as "conscious life, power, consciousness, awareness," associated in the Homeric epics with
thūmós, "spiritedness," and ''
, "soul," all of which depart the body in death. The gods endow both heroes and horses with ménos'' through breathing into them, so that "warriors eager for battle are literally 'snorting with
ménos.'" A
metaphor at
Iliad 5.296 compares a man falling in battle to horses collapsing when they are unharnessed after exertions. Cremation frees the
psychē from both
thūmós and
ménos so that it may pass into the afterlife; the horse, which embodies
ménos, races off and leaves the chariot behind, as in the
philosophical allegory of the chariot from
Plato. The anthropological term
mana has sometimes been borrowed to conceptualize the October Horse's potency, also expressed in modern scholarship as
numen. The physical exertions of the hard-breathing horse in its contest are thought to intensify or concentrate this
mana or
numen. In honoring the god who presided over the
Roman census, which among other functions registered the eligibility of young men for military service, the festivals of Mars have a strongly
lustral character. A lustration was performed in the Campus Martius following the census. Although lustral ceremonies are not recorded as occurring before the chariot races of the Equirria or the October Horse, it is plausible that they were, and that they were seen as a test or assurance of the lustration's efficacy.
The head {{multiple image '' resides (2nd century AD) The significance of the October Horse's head as a powerful trophy may be illuminated by the
caput acris equi, "head of a spirited ('sharp') horse," which
Vergil says was uncovered by
Dido and her colonists when they began the
dig to found
Carthage: "by this sign it was shown that the race
(gens) would be distinguished in war and abound with the means of life." The 4th-century agricultural writer
Palladius advised farmers to place the skull of a horse or ass on their land; the animals were not to be "virgin," because the purpose was to promote fertility. The practice may be related to the effigies known as
oscilla, figures or faces that Vergil says were hung from pine trees by mask-wearing
Ausonian farmers of Trojan descent when they were sowing seed. The location of sexual vitality or fertility in the horse's head suggests its
talismanic potency. The substance
hippomanes, which was thought to induce sexual passion, was supposedly exuded from the forehead of a foal;
Aelian (
ca. 175–235 AD) says either the forehead or "loins." Called
amor by Vergil, it is an ingredient in Dido's ritual preparations before her suicide in the
Aeneid. On Roman funerary reliefs, the deceased is often depicted riding on a horse for his journey to the afterlife, sometimes pointing to his head. 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.
Bread pendants 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. The shape of the "breads" is not recorded. Equines decorated with bread are found also on the
Feast of Vesta on June 9, when the asses who normally worked in the
milling and baking industry were dressed with garlands from which decorative loaves dangled. According to
Ovid, the ass was honored at the Vestalia as a reward for its service to the
Virgin Mother, who is portrayed in
Augustan ideology as simultaneously native and Trojan. When the
ithyphallic god
Priapus, an imported deity who was never the recipient of public cult, was about to rape Vesta as she slept, the braying ass woke her. In revenge, Priapus thereafter demanded the ass as a customary sacrifice to him. The
early Christian writer
Lactantius says that the garland of bread pendants commemorates the preservation of Vesta's sexual integrity
(pudicitia). Aelian recounts a myth in which the ass misplaces a
pharmakon entrusted to him by the king of the gods, thereby causing humanity to lose its eternal youth.
(Italic, 5th century BC) The symbolism of bread for the October Horse is unstated in the ancient sources. Robert Turcan has seen the garland of loaves as a way to thank Mars for protecting the harvest. Mars was linked to Vesta, the Regia, and the production of grain through several religious observances. In his
poem on the calendar, Ovid thematically connects bread and war throughout the month of June (
Iunius, a name for which Ovid offers multiple derivations including
Juno and "youths",
iuniores). Immediately following the story of Vesta, Priapus, and the ass, Ovid associates Vesta, Mars, and bread in recounting the
Gallic siege of Rome. The
Gauls were camped in the Field of Mars, and the Romans had taken to their last retreat, the
Capitoline citadel. 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, and is indignant that the Romans, destined to rule the world, are starving. Vesta causes flour to materialize, and the process of breadmaking occurs miraculously during the night, resulting in an abundance
(ops) of the gifts of Ceres. Jupiter wakes the sleeping generals and delivers an oracular message: they are to throw that which they least want to surrender from
the citadel onto the enemy. 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.
J.G. Frazer pointed to a similar throwing away of food abundance as a background to the October Horse, which he saw as the embodiment of the "
corn spirit". According to tradition, the fields consecrated to Mars had been appropriated by the Etruscan king
Tarquinius Superbus for his private use. Accumulated acts of arrogance among the royal family led to the expulsion of the king. The overthrow of the monarchy occurred at harvest time, and the grain from the Campus Martius had already been gathered for
threshing. Even though the tyrant's other property had been seized and redistributed among the people, the consuls declared that the harvest was under religious prohibition. In recognition of the new political liberty, a vote was taken on the matter, after which the grain and chaff were willingly thrown into the Tiber river. Frazer saw the October Horse as a
harvest festival in origin, because it took place on the king's farmland in the autumn. Since no source accounts for what happens to the horse apart from the head and tail, it is possible that it was reduced to ash and disposed of in the same manner as Tarquin's grain.
The tail ic Altar of Venus and Mars, later rededicated to
Silvanus 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. However, the tail itself was a
magico-religious symbol of fertility or power, and in 1974, at the request of
Georges Dumézil, a
vétérinaire-inspecteur from the Veterinary Services of Paris carried out a horse-slaughter experiment to demonstrate that blood from a severed horse's tail may drip or ooze about three minutes – a timeframe within which a good runner could reach the Regia but with the potential for an unlucky or poorly performing runner to fail ominously. 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. The practice of attaching a horse's tail to a helmet may originate in a desire to appropriate the animal's power in battle; in the
Iliad,
Hector's horse-crested helmet is a terrifying sight. In the iconography of the
Mithraic mysteries, the tail of the sacrificial bull is often grasped, as is the horse's tail in depictions of the
Thracian Rider god, as if to possess its power. A
pinax from
Corinth depicts a dwarf holding his
phallus with both hands while standing on the tail of a stallion carrying a rider; although the dwarf has sometimes been interpreted as the horse-threatening
Taraxippus, the phallus is more typically an
apotropaic talisman
(fascinum) to ward off malevolence.
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. Satyrs are first recorded in Roman culture as part of
ludi, appearing in the preliminary parade
(pompa circensis) of the first
Roman Games. The tail of the
wolf, an animal regularly associated with Mars, was said by
Pliny to contain
amatorium virus, aphrodisiac power. Dumézil rejected any phallic significance for the tail.
Tail docking as insult Plutarch relates that at the conclusion of the
Sicilian Expedition (413 BC), among the many humiliations inflicted by the victorious
Syracusans on the
Athenians was chopping off the manes and tails of their horses: "The public prisoners were collected together, the fairest and tallest trees along the river bank were hung with the captured suits of armour, and then the victors crowned themselves with wreaths, adorned their own horses splendidly while they sheared and cropped the horses of their conquered foes." by
Master Francke The October Horse sacrifice is part of a complex of meanings surrounding equine mutilation in Europe. 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." A similar act of horse disfigurement as an insult occurs in the Old Icelandic
saga of Hrólf Kraki. In the medieval period, the actual docking of the tail of a knight's horse carried a message of emasculation, defamation, and domination. Dozens of such mutilations are recorded in
medieval England after the practice was brought in by the
Normans. Tail mutilation was carried out frequently enough that it was criminalized and penalties were set in early medieval Germanic, Scandinavian, and Welsh law. As an indication that the horse tail represented or was associated with the penis, a 13th-century English law condemned a rapist not only to lose his life and limbs but also to have both the genitals and the tail of his horse cut off. In one of the most striking incidents, on
Christmas Eve 1170, four days before
Thomas Becket was martyred, an enemy cut off the tail of one of his horses and taunted him with it as a threat. On the Becket altarpiece of Hamburg, one of two known medieval depictions of the scene, the mutilator makes a phallic gesture with the horse's tail. A legend then arose that the descendants of the perpetrator grew tails and earned the insulting nickname
caudati, the "tailed ones," which spread to attach itself to all
Kentishmen; Greek-speaking Sicilians hurled the insult at the English generally in an incident during
Richard the First's crusade (1198–92). Equine mutilation as a form of insult survived into the early modern era. At
Somerset in 1611, a horse was paraded in a
skimmington ride, a form of public mockery usually aimed at a sexual offense or adultery. On this occasion, horns were attached to the animal's head, indicating cuckolding, and its ears and the hair of its mane and tail were cut off. The horse, in an instance of
transferred epithet, is said to be thus disgraced.
The Trojan Horse Timaeus (3rd century BC) attempted to explain the ritual of the October Horse in connection with the
Trojan Horse—an attempt mostly regarded by ancient and modern scholars as "hardly convincing." As recorded by
Polybius (2nd century BC), he tells us that the Romans still commemorate the
disaster at Troy by shooting (κατακοντίζειν, "to spear down") on a certain day a war-horse before the city in the Campus Martius, because the capture of Troy was due to the wooden horse — a most childish statement. 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. Timaeus in dealing with the foolish practice seems to me to exhibit not only ignorance but pedantry in supposing that in sacrificing a horse they do so because Troy was said to have been taken by means of a horse. Plutarch (d. 120 AD) also offers a Trojan origin as a possibility, noting that the Romans claimed to have descended from the Trojans and would want to punish the horse that betrayed the city. Festus said that this was a common belief, but rejects it on the same grounds as Polybius. Mars and a horse's head appear on opposite sides of the earliest Roman
didrachm, introduced during the
Pyrrhic War, which was the subject of Timaeus's book.
Michael Crawford attributes Timaeus's interest in the October Horse to the appearance of this coinage in conjunction with the war.
Walter Burkert has suggested that while the October Horse cannot be taken as a sacrificial reenactment against the Trojan Horse, there may be some shared ritualistic origin. The Trojan Horse succeeded as a stratagem because the Trojans accepted its validity as a
votive offering or dedication to a deity, and they wanted to transfer that power within their own walls. The spear that the Trojan priest
Laocoön drives into the side of the wooden horse is paralleled by the spear used by the officiating priest at the October sacrifice. ==Spear and officiant==