Anna Perenna- Roman GodDeity"Goddess of the Returning Year"

The Festival on the Ides

Anna Perenna's festival fell on March 15, the first full moon of what had once been the opening month of the Roman calendar. Ovid paints the celebration in the third book of the Fasti: Romans streamed to the banks of the Tiber and scattered across the grass, drinking in the open air. Some pitched tents while others improvised shelters from branches. Some simply spread their togas over propped-up reeds for shade. They drank steadily, each cup a prayer for another year of life, and they sang bawdy songs picked up in the theaters. Old women and old men joined with particular enthusiasm. On the way home the celebrants staggered through the streets, a spectacle to passersby.

Macrobius reports that worshippers prayed "ut annare perennareque commode possint," that they might comfortably pass through the year and endure perpetually. Her sacred grove stood near the Via Flaminia, just outside the city. Archaeological excavations there in 1999 uncovered inscribed offering vessels and ritual deposits confirming centuries of continuous worship.

From Carthage to the Numicius

Ovid offers the most elaborate origin story in the Fasti. Anna is the sister of Dido, queen of Carthage, the same Anna who had encouraged the doomed love affair with Aeneas in Virgil's fourth book. After Dido cast herself onto the funeral pyre, Anna mourned at the ashes. When Carthage fell to the Numidian king Iarbas, she fled by sea. A storm drove her ship to Malta, where her brother Pygmalion's reach threatened her again, and she sailed on until the winds carried her to the coast of Latium.

There Aeneas discovered her wandering the shore. He wept for Dido and took Anna into his household. But his wife Lavinia burned with jealousy at sheltering a woman from her husband's past. Dido's ghost appeared to Anna in a dream, blood-streaked and wild-haired, urging her to flee. Anna escaped the house by night and stumbled to the banks of the horned river Numicius. When Aeneas and his men tracked her at dawn, they found only the swollen current. Anna had vanished into the waters. Her voice rose from the river, newly divine, and the searchers broke into celebration in the fields.

The Old Woman and the War God

During the first secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, when the common people withdrew from Rome and supplies ran short, an old woman from the town of Bovillae baked rustic cakes each morning and brought them to the hungry crowd at dawn. When the crisis resolved and the plebs returned, they honored the woman who had fed them with divine status. Ovid records this as a second origin for Anna Perenna.

The Fasti also preserves a comic tale. Mars, burning with desire for Minerva, enlisted Anna Perenna as a go-between to plead his case. She led the war god on with false promises, stringing him along until the night of the supposed assignation. Mars lifted the bridal veil and found not Minerva but the aged Anna herself, cackling. The gods roared with laughter. Old songs sung at the festival retold the joke, and ribald verses became part of the March celebrations.