Anna Perenna

The first full moon of the old Roman year rose over a crowd that had no intention of going home sober. On the Ides of March the plebs walked out of the city to a grove at the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, spread themselves across the grass near the Tiber, and built shelters where they stood, some from cut branches and reeds, some from togas stretched over sticks. Then they drank, because the rule of the day was simple and widely loved: a person would live one year for every cup emptied. Old men tottered home at dusk loudly securing themselves another few decades. Couples sang songs too coarse for the city, danced without skill, and woke on trampled grass with wine-sour mouths and futures, by their own arithmetic, considerably extended.

The goddess collecting all this devotion was Anna Perenna, and her business was the year itself. Her doubled name says it twice over, from annare, to get through a year, and perennare, to keep getting through them. Macrobius preserves the prayer underneath the partying: Romans sacrificed to her publicly and privately so that the circle of the year might be completed happily. March opened the old calendar, its Ides marked the first full moon, and Anna Perenna stood at the hinge where one ring of months closed and the next began turning. Janus watched the doorway of the year. Anna kept its wheel moving.

Who she actually was depends on which Roman you asked, and Ovid, walking through the options in the third book of his Fasti, plainly enjoyed how little agreement he found. Some said she was the moon, measuring the year with her months. Some said Themis, or Io, or a nymph of Arcadian Azan who gave the infant Jupiter his first food. The stories disagree, and Ovid lets them.

His grandest version makes her Carthaginian royalty: Anna, sister of Dido. After the queen died on her pyre, Iarbas the Gaetulian seized Carthage, and Anna fled, first to Malta under the protection of king Battus, then to sea again when her brother Pygmalion came hunting her wealth. A storm threw her onto the coast of Latium, where Aeneas, now married to king Latinus’s daughter Lavinia, was walking the shore with his comrade Achates. He recognized the survivor, wept at the name of Dido, and brought his lover’s sister home. Lavinia said the gracious things and began planning. That night Dido appeared at Anna’s bedside, hair bloodied, voice low: get out of this house. Anna went through a low window in her shift and ran through the dark until the horned river god Numicius took her into his current. In the morning her trail still showed in the soft ground. The servants who followed it found footprints ending at the waterline, and while they stood there the river spoke. She was a nymph now, hidden in a stream that never fails, amne perenne latens, and Anna Perenna was her name.

Ovid’s other story is smaller, and it explains far better why the festival belonged to the common people. During the secession of the plebs, when the commoners abandoned Rome for the Sacred Mount and their supplies ran out, an old woman from the town of Bovillae, poor and country-bred, bound up her grey hair each dawn and baked rough cakes, carrying them out hot and passing them along the hungry camp before the morning chill burned off. When peace was made, the plebs did not forget. They set up a statue and made the cake woman a goddess.

The new goddess promptly earned her festival’s dirty songs. Mars came to her for help winning Minerva, reasoning that an old woman makes a fine go-between. Anna strung him along, then reported the happy news that Minerva had consented. A veiled bride was delivered to the war god’s chamber, and when Mars lifted the veil for a kiss he found not Minerva but old Anna of Bovillae, delighted with herself. The god of war got pranked by a grandmother. Rome retold the joke every March, in song, for centuries.

A goddess of so many origins never settled into one body. As the year she has no shape at all. As Dido’s sister she is a sea-worn exile, and as the river’s nymph she is invisible, a voice over moving water. The form Rome favored was the old woman, white-haired, bent, and faster-witted than any god who underestimated her.

Her worship was no poet’s invention. In 1999, excavation for an underground car park near Piazza Euclide in Rome broke into her fountain six meters below the modern street, its dedication still legible: NYMPHIS SACRATIS ANNAE PERENNAE, to the sacred nymphs of Anna Perenna. The basin held coins and lamps, and stranger cargo besides: some two dozen curse tablets and nested lead canisters holding little figurines of organic material, dolls made to do harm to named enemies. By late antiquity the cheerful goddess of new years had become a patroness of night magic, her clean spring the medium for curses, and the spring stayed in use into the sixth century. On her feast day in 44 BCE, while her crowds were out of the city drinking on the grass, the senators killed Julius Caesar. The Ides of March were hers long before they were his.

Her powers are the quiet kind. She grants the completion of the year, and another, and another, long life poured out a cup at a time. She endures where grander gods fade, hidden in perennial water, and she carries the particular cunning of the old, the kind that outmaneuvered the god of war with a veil. What she lacks is force. She commands no thunder, no armies, no sea. Her gifts arrive one year at a time and can be claimed only by those who keep showing up, and even her identity was never hers to fix, borrowed and rewritten by every Roman who told her story. She survived it all anyway, in wine, in footprints ending at a riverbank, and in cold water still rising under a Roman parking garage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anna Perenna?

Anna Perenna is the Roman goddess of the year’s renewal, whose name comes from the Latin for living through a year (annare) and lasting through many (perennare). Romans sacrificed to her publicly and privately so that the circle of the year would be completed happily, and her festival was especially beloved by the common people of Rome.

When was the festival of Anna Perenna?

The festival of Anna Perenna was held on the Ides of March, March 15, the first full moon of the old Roman year. Crowds left the city for her grove at the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, built shelters of reeds and branches on the grass near the Tiber, and drank one cup of wine for every year of life they hoped to gain.

Was Anna Perenna the sister of Dido?

In Ovid’s best-known account, yes. Anna fled Carthage after Dido’s suicide, survived shipwreck on the coast of Latium, and was taken in by Aeneas, but his wife Lavinia’s jealousy and a warning from Dido’s ghost drove her out by night, and she drowned in the river Numicius, emerging as the nymph Anna Perenna.

How did Anna Perenna trick Mars?

Mars asked Anna Perenna to help him win Minerva as his bride, and Anna pretended to succeed. On the wedding night she took the veiled bride’s place herself, and when Mars lifted the veil he found the old woman instead of Minerva. The bawdy songs sung at Anna Perenna’s festival were said to commemorate this trick.

What was found at the fountain of Anna Perenna in Rome?

In 1999, excavations near Piazza Euclide in Rome uncovered Anna Perenna’s fountain, with a dedication reading NYMPHIS SACRATIS ANNAE PERENNAE. Inside were coins, lamps, around two dozen curse tablets, and nested lead containers holding magical figurines, showing the shrine had become a center of curse magic and remained in use into the sixth century CE.

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