I've been on a bit of a Roman history binge lately, so I thought I would share a rather bizarre fact.
The ancient Romans every year, from April 12 to April 19, celebrated the Cerialia in honor of the goddess Ceres. This feast, as far as modern historians can determine, had agricultural roots--Ceres was the goddess of farmers. The Romans, however, had one peculiar custom on the last day: they attached lighted torches to the tails of foxes and let them run around. Ovid mentions this bizarre tradition in his Fasti:
Who ever got the idea to put a torch on a fox's back and let it run around? Was there ever any deeper significance to this custom?So I must explain why foxes are loosed then,
Carrying torches fastened to scorched backs.
(Ovid, Fasti, Bk. IV, ll. 681-682)
6 comments:
The only thing that comes to mind was the tactic used by ol' Genghis Khan, tying lighted rags to the tails of cats and then releasing them. Scared (for obvious reasons), they would run back into the city from whence they came, the city he was besieging. Thus was the city set alight and captured.
So, yes, I concur that this is probably not wise party behavior.
Poor cats, poor foxes.
It's probably not wise party behavior, but I'm sure it was a lot of fun. That's actually my guess for how this custom got started. One year a group of young guys (perhaps after a little too much wine) caught a fox and decided they would try something new--put a torch on its tail. When they didn't kill themselves, they said, "Hey, we didn't kill ourselves!" So, the next year they did it again.
Also not terribly festive behavior, if I remember, Samson (Old Testament) tied torches to foxes' tails and set them running through the Philistines' crops. Like Genghis Khan's, a very effective battle tactic. But doesn't Ovid explain why the Romans adopt this bizarre custom - and for a feast, no less?
Interesting, Therese. I found the passage about Samson at Judges 15:4-5: "So Samson went off and caught three hundred foxes, then took torches and turning the foxes tail to tail put a torch between each pair of tails. He lit the torches and set the foxes free in the Philistines' cornfields. In this way he burned both sehaves and standing corn, and the vines and olive trees as well."
Ovid's explanation of the custom is that a little child caught a fox and burned him this way, and that the Romans now punish foxes this way. There could be some truth, but I still think that to become a custom it needed some crazy guys who wanted to replicate the feat. (If you follow the link to the Fasti in the post and go down to April 19, you'll find Ovid's explanation.)
maybe it has something to do with burning your fields in the spring to help prepare for the next season. (http://www.valhallahills.com/spring-burn/) That is assuming the foxes are running around setting fields on fire. if not, I agree with steve.
Interestingly, Ovid says that he historical fox in question "[had] stolen many birds from the yard"; however, at Cerialia they burn foxes "to punish the species, / Destroyed in the same way as it destroyed the crops." So is it fowl or crops that are at stake? Perhaps the burning of foxes was a method of driving the species away from farms, and thus preventing them from stealing birds. Come to think of it, chicks were probably hatching more or less around this time in the spring.
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