Anna Perenna

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Her name is a doubled wish. The Romans heard in Anna Perenna the verb annare perannareque — to come through one year and on through the next — and read the goddess as a prayer made flesh: that the round of the year be completed and begun again, per annos, year upon year without a break. Macrobius preserves the formula spoken over her offerings, that one might pass through the turning year happily and live to pass through it once more. The name is older than any story told to explain it, and the stories, as it happens, never settled into one.

Finds recovered from the Anna Perenna spring, displayed at the Museo Nazionale Romano (Baths of Diocletian), Rome — Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

The feast on the Ides

Her great day fell on the Ides of March, the fifteenth, at a sacred grove on the bank of the Tiber near the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, just outside the old city. The placement matters. March, in the archaic Roman year, was the first month, and the Ides — the full moon — marked the first full moon of that year; Anna Perenna’s festival sat at the seam where the old year handed itself to the new. It was the old new year’s hinge, kept as a holiday of the plebs rather than a rite of the magistrates.

The fullest description is Ovid’s, in the third book of the Fasti, and it is a scene of cheerful disorder. The common people stream out to the riverbank. Some lie scattered on the open grass; some pitch low tents; some build leafy huts of branches, and some plant reeds for pillars and stretch their togas over them for a roof. They warm with sun and wine. The custom Ovid lingers on is the counting of cups: each celebrant prays for as many years of life as the goblets he drains, and drinks toward that number — so that, the poet says, a man will empty as many cups as Nestor counted years, and a woman drink her way toward the Sibyl’s age, if wine could only make the wish come true. They sing the songs they have picked up in the theaters, dance with loosened limbs, and the women let down their hair and reel home unsteady through the crowd. It is a feast of appetite turned into a liturgy of longevity: the drinking is the prayer, the cup the unit of the year.

The mood was also famously bawdy. Ovid notes that the day’s songs were coarse and the jokes obscene, and he ties this to one of his own etiologies (below) — the trick the goddess once played on Mars. The feast of the year’s renewal carried, by long license, the speech of the fertility-rite: ribald, fertile, unbuttoned. This places Anna Perenna in the company of the old agrarian and seasonal numina of the Roman countryside — the powers of the returning crop and the turning season such as Vertumnus, Flora, Pomona, and the rustic Fauna — rather than among the great state gods of the Capitol. Hers is the year as duration, the unbroken thread of seasons, set apart from the more specialized agrarian powers of the same calendar: the god of the stored grain, Consus, keeps what a single harvest has already yielded, where Anna Perenna keeps the open round in which harvest follows harvest. Like the wishes spoken over Salus (well-being) and Spes (hope), the prayer at her feast was for life to hold and continue.

Ovid’s irreconcilable origins

What Anna Perenna was is exactly the question the ancient sources cannot answer in one voice, and Ovid does not pretend to. In the Fasti he lines up his explanations one after another and lets them stand unreconciled — a deliberate plurality that is itself the most honest report we have of a cult whose object had grown obscure even to the Romans who kept it.

She is, in one account, an old woman of Bovillae, the village outside Rome, who during the plebeian secession to the Sacred Mount baked cakes through the night and carried them out to the hungry commons; for that kindness in a famine she was given a holiday when the plebs returned. She is, in another, the Moon herself — Luna — because she fills the year out with her months, the obvious gloss for a goddess whose name is the year. She is Themis; she is the nymph of the river Numicius; she is one of the daughters of Atlas. And she is, in the version Ovid develops at length, Anna the sister of Dido of Carthage.

That last is the literary thread that gives her a biography. After Dido’s death on the pyre, Anna flees the burning city, is driven across the sea, and washes at last onto the Italian shore — into the very Latium where Aeneas has settled. He receives her kindly; but Lavinia’s jealousy threatens her, and warned in a dream by her dead sister, Anna flees again into the night and is swept away by the river Numicius. When the search party calls her name along the bank, a voice answers from the water: hidden now in the perennial stream, she is called Anna Perenna. The etymology is folded into the myth — amne perenne latens, hiding in the everflowing river — so that the goddess of the unending year becomes, in the same breath, the nymph of the never-failing water. This is the strand the Aeneid itself sets up and Ovid completes; Virgil’s Anna, Dido’s unanima soror, her one-souled sister and the keeper of her secrets, is left poised at the edge of a deification the Fasti then delivers. Modern scholarship reads the river-nymph identity and the year-goddess as two faces forced together by the name: a water-numen and a calendar-numen meeting in a single perennial.

Then comes the trick that earns the festival its dirty songs. Once she had become a goddess, Mars enlisted her as a go-between: he was in love with Minerva and wanted Anna to plead his case. Anna strung him along with promises, and on the appointed night brought a veiled bride to his bed — but lifting the veil, Mars found not the cold maiden goddess but the old wrinkled face of Anna herself, who had taken the bride’s place. The gods laughed, Venus loudest of all, and the memory of the war-god gulled is why, Ovid says, the people sing filthy verses at her grove. The story has the shape of a New Year’s inversion — the soldier’s god made a fool, the old woman triumphant, license granted to mock — and belongs to the same seasonal logic as the other March rites, in which the worn-out year was driven off so the fresh one could come in.

The spring at Parioli

For nearly all of its recorded life the cult was a thing of texts: Ovid, Macrobius, a line of Martial, the grove at the milestone known only from the page. That changed in the autumn of 1999, when digging for an underground car park at Piazza Euclide, in the Parioli district north of the old city, struck a buried spring some six to ten meters below the modern street. Cleared by Marina Piranomonte for the city’s archaeological superintendency over the following season, it proved to be a rectangular fountain fed by a natural spring, with marble inscriptions built into its fabric naming the dedication: to the sacred nymphs of Anna Perenna, nymphis sacratis Annae Perennae. An altar and dedicatory blocks of the second century carry her name in stone — the first hard epigraphic anchor for a goddess otherwise glimpsed only through poets — and the cult activity at the spring runs back, on the excavators’ reading, to the Republican centuries and forward into late antiquity, the fountain itself in use until roughly the sixth century. The place gave a real location, and a real chronology, to the everflowing water her name had always promised.

Objects from the deposit in the Anna Perenna spring, Museo Nazionale Romano, Baths of Diocletian — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

What lay in the basin and the cistern behind it transformed the site from a local curiosity into one of the most important finds in the study of Roman religion. Among the hundreds of coins and dozens of oil lamps thrown in as ordinary votives — the long, slow piety of people coming to a holy spring — the mud held a second, darker class of offering, almost all of it from late antiquity, the fourth through the early sixth century. There were inscribed lead tablets folded and pierced: defixiones, binding-curses, more than a score of them. There were stacked cylindrical containers of lead sheet, one nested inside another and sealed, and inside several of them small humanoid figures of organic material — figurines made to stand for a victim, bound and named. There were lamps with curse-texts scratched inside the bowl, a copper cauldron, and other apparatus of private, anonymous working. This is among the richest single deposits of Roman binding-magic ever recovered, and it has reshaped the modern picture of how, and how late, such practice persisted in the Christianizing capital. The detailed publication of the tablets and figurines is the work of Jürgen Blänsdorf and Piranomonte; the architecture of the rite — that a spring was held to carry words and bound likenesses downward, out of the daylight world to the powers below, and that the holy water of a genial goddess could be borrowed for the most private of hostilities — is the historical point, and the procedures themselves lie outside what can be set down.

Copper cauldron (caccabus) from the magical deposit in the Anna Perenna spring, Museo Nazionale Romano — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

The two faces of the spring sit strangely together: above, the bright public picnic where strangers wished one another a long life; below, in the same water, the folded lead by which a person wished, in secret, to end a rival’s luck, or voice, or love. Scholarship has not forced them into a single doctrine, and the better readings do not try — they note instead that a perennial spring was exactly the kind of threshold a Roman expected to work in both directions, a mouth that could carry a blessing up into the year or a curse down out of it. Anna Perenna stands at that threshold: a goddess attested less by any settled account of who she was than by what was done at her water, where the city came both to drink to the years ahead and, when the lamps were lit and the songs done, to write a name on lead and drop it where the spring would take it.

The record

The literary dossier is short but central. Ovid’s Fasti III, lines 523–710, is the single richest source — the festival, the cup-counting, the cascade of origins, the Mars deception — and is freely available in the Theoi Classical Texts Library; Virgil’s Aeneid IV supplies the Anna-of-Carthage strand that Ovid’s deification completes, and Silius Italicus and Macrobius round out the antique testimony, with Varro and a Republican coin of Gaius Annius (88 BCE) adducing her name to the larger argument. The concise pre-archaeology summary in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica already fixes the etymology, the grove at the first Flaminian milestone, and the Macrobian formula — a useful baseline against which to measure how much the 1999 spring changed the field. For the institutional setting of the festival within the Roman religious year the standard account is Religions of Rome (Beard, North & Price, 1998). The Parioli sanctuary itself is presented by Marina Piranomonte, who directed the excavation and has published its religion-and-magic dimension at length, with the curse-texts edited together with Jürgen Blänsdorf; and the figure of the goddess across literature, art, numismatics, and the new epigraphy is drawn together for the first time in the essay collection Uncovering Anna Perenna, edited by Gwynaeth McIntyre and Sarah McCallum (Bloomsbury, 2019), which reads her precisely as a study in liminality — the Carthaginian outsider naturalized into Rome, the water-nymph who is also the year. Across all of it the goddess keeps the shape her name first gave her: a spring that does not run dry and a year that comes round again, the two so tightly bound in the single word perennis that the cup raised on the Ides and the lead dropped in the dark were, in the end, addressed to the same water.

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