Anna Perenna

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Anna Perenna was a Roman goddess of the turning year, whose name the Romans themselves heard as a wish that life might run on per annos — through the years, year after year. Her great festival fell on the Ides of March, the fifteenth, at a sacred grove by the Tiber near the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, where the city came out to drink and picnic on the riverbank.

The fullest account is Ovid’s, in the third book of the Fasti, and it is characteristically generous with explanations. The poet offers several at once: that she was an old woman of Bovillae who fed the plebs during their secession; that she was the moon, measuring out the months; that she was Anna, the sister of Dido, who fled burning Carthage and washed up in Latium, only to drown in a river and become a nymph; and that, once a goddess, she played a bawdy trick on Mars, promising him the maiden Minerva and slipping into the marriage bed herself in disguise. These stories do not agree, and Ovid does not make them. What they share is the figure of a woman bound up with continuity, the year, and the river.

The festival itself is better attested than the goddess behind it. Ovid describes couples lying on the grass under makeshift tents of branches, drinking as many cups as the years they hoped to live, singing what they had picked up in the theaters and dancing until they staggered home. It was a plebeian feast, raucous and well loved, and it marked the old new year, when March still opened the Roman calendar.

For most of its history the cult was known only from such texts. That changed in 1999, when construction in the Parioli district of Rome uncovered a spring sanctuary with an inscription naming the nymphae sacrae Annae Perennae — the sacred nymphs of Anna Perenna. The fountain had remained in use for centuries, and into its basin people had dropped offerings of a darker kind: lead curse tablets, lamps, and small containers, some holding figurines pierced and bound. The find is among the richest single deposits of Roman binding-magic known, and it tied this otherwise genial goddess of feasting to the more private practice of cursing one’s rivals.

The two faces sit oddly together — the public picnic and the buried curse — and scholarship has not fully reconciled them, beyond noting that springs and the powers attached to them were long thought to carry messages downward, out of sight. What survives is a goddess attested more by what was done at her water than by any clear doctrine about who she was: a name for the year’s renewal, and a place where Romans came both to wish each other long life and to wish harm on one another in secret.

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