Quirinus

Storm light over the Campus Martius, and the king was gone. One moment Romulus stood before the assembled army in the dust and the noise of a military review; then the sky closed over, a squall of wind and darkness swept the field, and when it cleared the throne was empty. The soldiers looked at the senators who had been standing nearest. The senators looked at the sky. Rome had lost its founder and gained a god, though it would take a frightened farmer’s testimony to make the second part stick.

That god was Quirinus, and his story runs backward as much as forward. Long before he was Romulus he was somebody else’s deity entirely. The Sabines kept him, a spear-god of the hill town of Cures, and when their king Titus Tatius came down to settle on the ridge north of the early city, after the war over the stolen women had been patched into peace, the cult came with him. The Romans took the hill and the god together. They called the height the Collis Quirinalis, and in time it lent its name to everything raised on it, so that a modern city still calls a palace after a Sabine war spirit nobody remembers.

His name carries the argument about him. One reading takes it from quiris, a Sabine word for spear, which makes him a wielder of the spear and fits a war god cleanly enough. Another builds it from co-viri, men gathered together, the citizen body standing shoulder to shoulder. The Romans themselves felt the second meaning in their bones, because they called themselves Quirites when they meant not soldiers on campaign but citizens at home: taxpayers, voters, the civic crowd. Quirinus was the god of that crowd. Mars took the men out through the gates to kill and be killed; Quirinus kept the same men when they came back in and became farmers and fathers and members of their curiae again. He was war set down and folded away, the spear leaned in the corner.

For a long stretch he mattered enormously. The oldest ranking of Roman gods, older than the Capitoline three, put Jupiter first, Mars second, and Quirinus third, and each of the three was served by a flamen maior, a senior priest hedged about with taboos and antique dignity. The Flamen Quirinalis was that priest, third in precedence, and he still had his fixed rounds of sacrifice centuries after most Romans had forgotten what the god behind him actually did. A twentieth-century reading by Georges Dumezil sorted the trio into functions of sovereignty, war, and productive community, and set Quirinus in the third. Whatever the scheme’s merits, it names the thing the Romans sensed: this was the god of the people as a working, breeding, grain-growing whole.

His festival caught the same flavor and undercut it with a joke. The Quirinalia fell on the seventeenth of February, and it doubled as the stultorum feriae, the feast of fools. The name was practical rather than cruel. Rome’s citizens made offerings to the oven-goddess by curia across the preceding days, and anyone too muddled to know which curia he belonged to, or which day was his, could turn up on the Quirinalia and make good the rite he had bungled. A whole day set aside for people who had lost track. There is something very Roman in giving that its own place on the calendar.

The apotheosis is where the god and the man fuse for good. By the time of the poet Ennius, two centuries before Christ, it was settled that Quirinus simply was Romulus, taken up into heaven and renamed. Livy tells it plainly and then tells you not everyone believed it: the king vanishes in the storm, the senators nearest him fall under quiet suspicion of having torn him apart, and the panic eases only when a man named Proculus Julius stands up and swears that Romulus came down to him from the sky, taller and fairer than in life, with instructions that Rome should worship him as Quirinus and go on to rule the world. Ovid gives the scene its machinery. Mars reminds Jupiter of an old promise, swoops down, and carries Romulus off in his chariot as the mortal part of him melts away in the air like a lead bullet flung from a sling. His widow Hersilia is drawn up after him on the track of a falling star and made a goddess too, under the name Hora.

He had a temple to match, on his own hill, vowed during the wars against the Samnites and dedicated in 293 BCE, then rebuilt in cool marble splendor under Augustus. Myrtle grew in his precinct. And yet for all the stone and the priesthood, he faded. Even educated Romans of the late Republic could not agree on what he had originally been, whether Sabine or native, war god or peace god, a person or an idea. By the end, even the Romans were not sure what he had been.

His powers were never the flashy kind. He guarded the community, sanctified the citizen in his civil person, lent his name to the whole body politic, and stood as the still, domestic half of a war god’s nature. His weakness was built into that quietness. A god of settled ordinary life has nothing dramatic to defend, and when the newer Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva rose to command the state cult, Quirinus had no myth cycle of his own to hold the ground with, only a hill, a festival, and a dead king’s borrowed name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Quirinus?

Quirinus is a Roman god, originally a Sabine war deity worshipped on the Quirinal Hill and later identified as the deified form of Romulus, Rome’s founder-king. He was one of the three gods of Rome’s Archaic Triad, ranked after Jupiter and Mars.

What was Quirinus the god of?

Quirinus was the god of the Roman people in their civilian capacity, the citizens known as Quirites. Where Mars governed Romans as soldiers at war, Quirinus governed the same men as a settled, productive community at peace.

Is Quirinus the same as Romulus?

Yes. By at least the second century BCE, Romans held that Romulus did not die but was carried into heaven and became the god Quirinus. Livy records that a man named Proculus Julius swore Romulus appeared to him and asked to be worshipped under that name.

When was the Quirinalia celebrated?

The Quirinalia, the festival of Quirinus, was held on 17 February. It was also called the stultorum feriae, or “feast of fools,” because it was the day when citizens who had missed their curia’s earlier oven-goddess rites could perform them late.

Why did Quirinus become less important?

Quirinus faded because he had no myth cycle of his own and was overshadowed by the newer Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. By the late Republic even educated Romans disagreed about his origins and his original nature.

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