A Rite Even the Romans Struggled to Explain

Ovid, describing the Argei in the fifth book of the Fasti, openly admits his uncertainty about the puppets' meaning, and lays out several explanations current in his own day: that they stood in for elderly men once thrown into the river in a literal human sacrifice later humanized into effigy, that they represented foreign settlers whose expulsion the rite commemorated, or that they honored the legendary Argive companions of Hercules said to have died in Italy. Modern scholars have added further theories without settling the question, some connecting the rite to more general Mediterranean patterns of scapegoat ritual, in which a substitute object absorbs a community's accumulated pollution and is then formally expelled.

What the ancient disagreement itself shows clearly is that by the late Republic and early Empire, educated Romans no longer had confident access to the rite's original meaning, only its continued performance and a general sense, which none of the competing explanations actually contradict, that it functioned as an act of purification tied to the city's oldest sacred geography, its founding bridge over the Tiber. The second century grammarian Festus records yet another version, connecting the effigies to elderly Romans once thrown from the bridge by custom before captives were substituted, and modern historians usually read the whole tangle of competing ancient explanations as evidence that the rite had simply outlived any living memory of its own founding purpose by the time educated Romans began asking what it meant.