in october, ancient rome left 7 dated events: the sister's beam · no battle, no levy, no sailing, no wedding · the luck of the state: a goddess with an altar. here is what happened, day by day.
on the kalends of october the calendar of the arval brethren records a place: the sister's beam, by the crossroads of the acilii. the day comes to us from the stone; the story of horatius that explains it, from the books. and the books agree neither on what the beam looked like nor on who passed the guilty man beneath it.
read the full entry →5 october was one of the three days in the year when the mundus stood open, and rome avoided joining battle, calling men to arms, setting sail or marrying. the prohibitions come with a named transmitter; what the mundus was and where it stood is still unknown.
read the full entry →on 9 october the roman calendar recorded sacrifices to the public genius, to fausta felicitas and to venus victrix on the capitol. there is no story, no victim, no priest: only a calendar entry copied onto two stones. what the stone says and what scholarship has laid on top of it are best read separately.
read the full entry →on 11 october, at the end of the grape harvest, rome tasted the new wine alongside the old and many people repeated a formula to heal themselves. varro explained the name of the festival by the verb to heal; out of the formula there later came a goddess of whom not a single temple or inscription is known.
read the full entry →on 12 october 19 bce augustus came back from the east and entered rome by night to dodge the welcome being prepared for him. the senate turned that arrival into an altar, a yearly sacrifice and a day bearing his name. the yearly sacrifice we know only from the text written by its beneficiary himself.
read the full entry →every 13 october the romans threw garlands into the springs and crowned the wells. of what was done that day only one sentence of varro survives. the contrast with the nine aqueducts that frontinus inventoried is drawn by no ancient source: it is drawn by this entry.
read the full entry →on 19 october rome celebrated the armilustrium, the purification of arms, at a place on the aventine that no one has identified. that it closed the war season in symmetry with 19 march is a modern reading of the calendar, and it has an author.
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