The Argei

Each March, according to Roman antiquarian sources, the Vestal Virgins and other officiants made twenty-seven puppets from rushes, bound and shaped roughly like men, and distributed them among shrines called Argei scattered across Rome's districts. Two months later, on the Ides of May, these same effigies were gathered up, carried in procession by the pontifices and Vestals to the Pons Sublicius, Rome's oldest bridge, and thrown into the Tiber below. Ancient sources agree the rite had something to do with purification of the city, the sort of ritual cleansing Roman religion regularly performed at fixed points in the calendar, but they diverge sharply on what the puppets themselves represented and why throwing bound human figures into the river should achieve that end.

The Vestals' central role and the rite's clear connection to two of Rome's most archaic religious institutions, the bridge itself and the college of Vestals, mark it as very old, likely reaching back to the earliest strata of Roman religious practice, well before the historical explanations later writers offered for it had settled into anything like consensus. Twenty-seven such shrine-stations eventually stood across the city's districts, and Roman antiquarians disputed whether the number reflected an old Romulean division of the city or a later reorganization, a question left as unresolved as everything else about the rite's deeper meaning.

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.