Dis Pater- Roman GodDeity"Rich Father"

The Altar at the Tarentum

His name meant "Rich Father," from dives and pater, because everything underground belonged to him: the dead and the ores they lay among. Romans did not build his altar in daylight. It sat buried in the Campus Martius at a place called the Tarentum, near the bend of the Tiber, sealed beneath earth and only uncovered when the god required feeding.

Valerius Maximus records how the site was found. A Sabine named Valesius had two sick children and no cure. An oracle told him to take water from the Tarentum and heat it over the altar of Dis Pater and Proserpina. He found the spot in the Campus Martius, dug, and uncovered an altar already there, as though someone had buried it and forgotten. He heated the water. The children recovered. Valesius sacrificed in gratitude, held a feast that lasted three days, and the altar was covered again.

When the rites came due, priests uncovered the altar at night. The victims were black. Their blood ran not onto a raised surface but down into pits dug in the earth, returning what the god was owed by the route he preferred: straight down.

The Secular Games

Once per saeculum, roughly every hundred years, Rome uncovered the Tarentum altar for the ludi saeculares. Three nights of sacrifice to Dis Pater and Proserpina opened the festival, conducted in darkness by torchlight. The logic was arithmetic: a saeculum was the longest human lifespan, and when it ended, everyone alive at its start was dead. The underworld had collected its generation. The games marked the ledger settled.

Augustus celebrated the Secular Games in 17 BCE. The quindecimviri sacris faciundis, the priestly college of fifteen, oversaw the rites. Horace composed the Carmen Saeculare for the occasion, a hymn sung by a chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls. The inscribed record of the ceremonies, preserved on stone, lists the nocturnal sacrifices at the Tarentum before the daytime celebrations that followed. Night came first. Dis Pater was paid before Apollo was praised.

The Devotio of Decius Mus

In 340 BCE, at the Battle of Vesuvius, the Roman left wing broke. Its commander, the consul Publius Decius Mus, called for the pontifex Marcus Valerius. Livy preserves the formula. Decius stood on a spear, veiled his head, placed one hand beneath his toga, and spoke the words: he devoted himself and the enemy army to Tellus, the Manes, and Dis Pater.

Then he rode into the Latin lines. He fought until they killed him. Livy writes that the enemy fell back from the place where his body lay as though the ground itself were cursed. The Roman line reformed. Rome won.

Decius's son performed the same ritual at Sentinum in 295 BCE, against the Gauls and Samnites. He too died. He too won.