Flora

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Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers and of the act of flowering — not of plants in general, but of the precise moment a plant comes into bloom, the hinge on which a season turns toward fruit. Her domain was narrow and enormous at once. Vines, grain, fruit trees, and meadows all passed through her hands at the instant they flowered, and on that instant the harvest depended; a Roman could pray to her that the blossom set rather than fall.

The cult was old. Roman antiquarian writers traced her worship back to the regal period, crediting its establishment to the Sabine king Titus Tatius, and a flamen, the flamen Floralis, tended her. Her temple stood near the Circus Maximus, and from 173 BCE her festival, the ludi Florales, was held as a fixed annual event in the spring — late April into early May, the height of the flowering year. The games were notorious for their licence: theatrical performances of marked obscenity, the freeing of hares and goats, the scattering of beans and lupins, crowds in bright clothing. The exuberance was not incidental. A festival of flowering was a festival of fertility, and the Romans let it be exactly that.

What is known of Flora as a figure, rather than a cult, comes largely from the poet Ovid, who in the Fasti gives her a long first-person speech for the opening of her festival. There she is identified with the Greek nymph Chloris, carried off by the west wind Zephyrus and made, in compensation, mistress of flowers; she tells too of granting the goddess Juno a magic flower by whose touch Mars was conceived without a father. How much of this is genuine Roman tradition and how much Ovid’s own Hellenizing literary invention is a question scholarship leaves open — the Chloris identification in particular looks like a Greek graft onto an Italic deity whose origins lie elsewhere. The plain Italian goddess of the blossom is older and stranger than the charming nymph the poetry made of her.

Her reach extended past the literal flower. Because Roman thought linked blooming with youth and the prime of life, Flora could stand for flourishing in the wider sense — the brief season of fullness before decline — and that association kept her name alive long after the cult lapsed. Renaissance painting and poetry recovered her readily as a personification of spring, the crowned and garlanded figure, by which point she had become less a goddess than an image. The image is graceful and a little tame. The festival that honoured the real cult was neither.

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