Consus

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The Latin verb condere means to put away, to lay up, to store — the act of taking what is loose and exposed and closing it inside something that will keep it. Grain reaped from the field is, until that moment, still at risk: it can rot, sprout, be eaten, be burned, be stolen. Once it has been threshed, dried, and sealed into pit or jar, it has crossed a line. It has been condita — stored. Consus was the god who stood on the far side of that line. His province was not the green crop in the ear, nor the cut sheaf on the threshing-floor, but the supply already gathered in and shut away: the reserve that had to last the household and the city until the next harvest came. Where the agrarian numina of the Italian countryside faced outward — Flora toward the flower, Pomona toward the ripening fruit, Silvanus and Faunus toward the wild margin of the cultivated land — Consus faced inward, toward the sealed darkness of the storehouse.

The valley floor of the Circus Maximus, with the Palatine ruins beyond — the low ground of the Murcia valley where Consus’s buried altar lay near the first turning-post. — Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

That orientation explains the single strangest thing about him. A Roman deity who mattered usually had a temple raised above ground, doors and a roof and a cult-image facing the street. Consus had an altar that was kept buried. It lay on the valley floor of the Circus Maximus, in the low ground of the Murcia valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, near the first turning-post of the race-course. For most of the year it was covered with packed earth, invisible, trodden over by the crowds and the chariots. Only on the days of his festivals was the soil swept away to expose it, the offerings made, and the earth then heaped back over it again. The Roman antiquarians who recorded this read the buried altar as a deliberate image of the god’s own domain: a divinity whose power worked underground, in the pit and the silo, was rightly honored at an altar that was itself kept under the ground. The materiality is exact rather than poetic. Romans did store grain below the surface — in subterranean vaults, in cut pits, and in the great earthenware jars called dolia sunk into the floor — so the hidden altar and the hidden harvest answered to one another directly.

The two Consualia and the agricultural year

The buried altar was opened twice a year, and the two openings bracketed the working year of grain. The first Consualia fell on the 21st of August, after the summer harvest had been brought in and was newly stored — the moment when the reserve was full and its safekeeping began. The second fell on the 15th of December, in the dead of the year, when the stores stood guard against winter and the seed for the coming sowing lay waiting. A third, lesser act belonged to the same cycle: a sacrifice offered at the altar by the pontiffs on the 7th of July, read as a preparatory rite before the harvest and sowing season. The rhythm is that of a granary, not a field — fullness, watch, and preparation, the three points at which stored grain is most at stake.

The summer feast did not stand alone. Four days after the August Consualia, on the 25th, came the Opiconsivia, the festival of Ops — and in her cult-title Ops Consiva, the goddess of the abundance laid by, the cult of Consus and the cult of Ops mirror one another across those four days, the act of storing and the plenty stored — a doubling of the same harvest-abundance impulse that elsewhere in the Roman pantheon took shape as Abundantia, the personified plenty of the granary and the cornucopia. The pairing is old enough that the festival calendar set them side by side. At the summer Consualia, the rite at the buried altar was carried out by the flamen Quirinalis together with the priestesses of Vesta, a configuration that bound Consus into the most archaic priesthoods of the Roman state and links his cult, through Quirinus, into the city’s oldest sacred order rather than to any imported or later cult.

An early-eighteenth-century reconstruction of the Circus Maximus in use (above) over a view of its site (below); the Circus held the oldest games at Rome, the Consuales Ludi of Consus. — Jan Goeree, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The festivals also gave the Circus its earliest use. The oldest games recorded at the site of the Circus Maximus are the Consuales Ludi, the games of Consus, and the day belonged as much to the animals of the harvest as to the god. Like Anna Perenna, whose own riverside feast marked the turning of the year, Consus was a deity defined less by a statue or a temple than by a date kept and a rite performed at a fixed place. Horses, mules, and asses — the beasts of the plough, the cart, and the threshing-floor — were released from all labor, crowned with garlands of flowers, and led through the streets. Races were run in the Circus, among them the mule-drawn race that struck even Roman observers as archaic. The working animals that hauled the grain to its store were rested and honored on the day the god of the store was uncovered: the cult held together the whole apparatus of getting grain in and keeping it, the god, the harvest, and the animals that moved it.

The charter-myth: the seizure of the Sabine women

One narrative anchored the Consualia in the story of the city’s beginning, and it is by this tale that Consus is most often remembered. According to the legend of the founding, the newly settled Romans under Romulus had no wives, and the neighboring peoples would not give them their daughters in marriage. Romulus therefore proclaimed games in honor of Consus and invited the surrounding communities — among them the Sabines — to attend with their families. When the spectators were absorbed in the festival, the Romans seized the unmarried women and carried them off, an act that gave the new city its first wives and precipitated its first war — a foundation episode that the ancient Roman religion later lodged at the very heart of the Circus and its games. The episode is set, in the tellings of Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Ovid, precisely at the festival of Consus, so that the rite the historical Romans kept every August and December was woven into the foundational drama of how Rome got its women and its enemies at a single stroke.

Jacques-Louis David’s “The Intervention of the Sabine Women” (1799) depicts the sequel to the seizure staged at the festival of Consus, as the abducted women halt the war between their fathers and their new husbands. — Jacques-Louis David, Musée du Louvre, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Whether the festival ever carried that meaning for its earliest celebrants is a separate question. Modern scholarship treats the Sabine episode as a charter-myth — a narrative attached after the fact to an ancient observance whose real origins were no longer understood — rather than as the historical reason for the cult. What the myth does record faithfully is the cult’s antiquity: a rite old enough, and obscure enough, that the Romans of the historical period reached for the founder himself to explain why it existed.

The unstable identity: Neptune, the hidden god, and counsel

The further one moves from the granary, the less stable Consus becomes, and the ancient sources themselves register the instability. Because the Consualia included horse-races and honored working beasts, several Roman and Greek writers connected — or fully merged — Consus with Neptunus Equestris, Neptune in his aspect as god of horses, an identification that drew the old Italic grain-numen toward the Greek Poseidon Hippios. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports this equation but does not let it pass unchallenged. He records a second tradition, which he found more persuasive, that the games and horse-races were indeed Neptune’s, but that the subterranean altar belonged to a different and unnamed divinity — a god whose name might not be spoken, who presided over and guarded hidden counsels. Dionysius observes, pointedly, that no one anywhere in the Greek or barbarian world had ever raised a secret altar to Neptune; the very fact that this altar was buried argued against the identification. His doubt is the earliest surviving sign that the horse-god reading sat uneasily on the buried god of the store.

The second secondary identity ran through the god’s name. Some ancient authorities, the antiquarian Festus among them, derived Consus not from condere but from consilium, counsel, and recast him as a god of hidden plans — which made him a fitting patron for the stratagem by which Romulus had contrived the seizure of the Sabines. This reading found its most striking witness in the inscription that Tertullian, writing in the early third century, reports from the buried altar in the Circus: a verse naming Consus mighty in counsel, Mars mighty in war, and the Lares as the powers presiding. The line fuses the god of the store with the god of the secret plan and sets him in company that is martial and political rather than agrarian.

Modern scholarship reads both of these as later harmonizations laid over an older and simpler figure. Wissowa, in his account of Roman cult (1912), and Dumézil, in his synthesis of archaic Roman religion (1970), both treat the Neptunus-Equestris merger as a secondary equation generated by the horse-races and obscuring the figure’s likely origin as a numen of the harvest-store; the consilium etymology and the counsel-god they treat as learned wordplay, a pun on the divine name rather than a record of its meaning. Dumézil and, after him, Capdeville hold condere to be the soundest derivation, reading Consus as an archaic verbal noun for the very act of storing-away — the god, in effect, being the action of laying grain by. Not all are persuaded even of this: the historian Daniele Miano has called the condere etymology hazardous and questionable, leaving the name’s root, like much else about the figure, finally uncertain. What survives across all the readings is the granary: the horse-god, the counsel-god, and the founder’s stratagem are accretions, and beneath them sits a god of the stored grain.

The textual record and its scholarship

Almost everything known of Consus comes through a small set of writers, none of them his worshippers in any continuous cult. The festival calendar itself — preserved in the surviving Roman fasti — fixes the dates of the two Consualia and the Opiconsivia. The charter-myth is carried by Livy (Ab Urbe Condita I.9), by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the Roman Antiquities (II.30–31), by Plutarch in his Life of Romulus, and by Ovid, who treats the August festival in the Fasti and the seizure in the Ars Amatoria. Dionysius is the most valuable single witness, because he both transmits the Neptune identification and argues against it, preserving the ancient awareness that the buried altar fit a hidden god better than it fit the sea. The buried altar’s inscription survives only through the Christian apologist Tertullian, who in De Spectaculis (chapter 5) cites the Circus altar to Consus as evidence of the pagan origins of the games — a hostile source preserving a cult-text its author meant to condemn. The antiquarian Festus, abridging the lexicon of Verrius Flaccus, is the principal channel for the consilium etymology and the god’s learned associations.

The modern reconstruction rests on two foundational treatments. Georg Wissowa’s Religion und Kultus der Römer (2nd ed., 1912) set the agrarian, indigenous reading of Consus against the Greek-derived sea-god harmonization and established the framework most later scholars work within. Georges Dumézil’s Archaic Roman Religion (French original La religion romaine archaïque, 1966; English translation 1970) placed Consus within the cycle of harvest and storage deities, pairing him with Ops Consiva and arguing for the condere etymology. Later scholarship — including the iconographic and topographical work of recent decades on the Circus Maximus and the Murcia valley, and the skeptical reassessment of the etymology by Daniele Miano in his study of the Roman personification cults — has refined rather than overturned that picture, while leaving the name’s ultimate root an open philological question. The controlling primary text for the inscription remains Tertullian; the controlling text for the cult’s place in the founding legend remains Dionysius.

What emerges is a thin but coherent picture: an indigenous Italian deity of agrarian abundance, attached to the most practical of concerns, kept buried and brought out twice a year, and remembered chiefly through a festival that Rome retold as the scene of its own beginnings.

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