Dear friends of ancient Mythology! With Quirinus we dive deep into the earliest history of Rome. The coin: Roman Republic, C.Memmius c.f., gens Memmia. AR - Denarius, 3.97g, 16.95x19.64mm, 210°. Rome, 56 BC. Obv.: C MEMMI C.F. Bearded head of Quirinus with laurel wreath, r. behind QVIRINVS Rev.: MEMMIVS AED CERIALIA PREIMVS FECIT Ceres enthroned r., holding torch in right hand and 3 ears of grain in left; in front of her a serpent erecting r. Ref.: Crawford 427/2; Sydenham 921; Kestner3463; BMCRR Rome 3941; CNR Memmia19; Memmia 9 VF, fine toning, oval cuirass, rev. off-centre. Note: The rev. legend reads "(The festival of) Cerialia was first hosted by the Aedile Memmius." About this coin: On the reverse Ceres is depicted, an allusion to Gaius Memmius C.f. Quirinus, a plebeian aedile before 210 BC who had introduced the Ludi Ceriales (Crawford). The gens Memmia was a plebeian family that provided numerous tribunes from the Jugurthine Wars to the time of Augustus. The origin of their name is not known. Virgil associated the gens with the Trojan hero Mnestheus. The use of Quirinus on denarii of Gaius Memmius perhaps alludes to a Sabine origin of the name. Quirinus: Quirinus was the tribal god of the earliest inhabitants of the Roman hill, which was called collis Quirinalis after him, which according to ancient tradition were the Sabine Quirites. His worship was always confined to the Quirinal in Rome. He lacked characteristic special traits and individual functions because he was the divine exponent of all the wishes and interests of his congregation (Roscher). He was most likely to appear as a god of war, which is understandable at a time when warlike prowess and military success played an important role in these ancient Italian communities crowded together in a small space. Thus, he was early interpreted as a parallel deity to Mars of the mountain Romans. The name Quirites was associated with the Sabine city Cures and with curis, quiris (Sabine = lance), according to Varro, Ovid and Macrobius. More recent authors prefer a derivation from covirites (= total manhood, citizenship). In historical times, the Quirites are always identical with Romani. The official term populus Romanus Quiritium summarises both. Quirites was used as the name of the Romans when one wanted to honour them (Varro). The ius Quiritium is the ancient, ceremonial synonym of ius Romanum. Originally, however, the Quirites - linguistically inseparable from their god Quirinus - were apparently the inhabitants of the collis Quirinalis, the Sabines, who united to form a community, the city of Rome, after the much-discussed conflict with the inhabitants of the palatium (rape of Sabine women), the Romans. Around the time of Cicero, two narratives emerged linking Quirinus to the prehistory of Rome. Both are incompatible, but existed side by side. (1) Under the influence of M. Terentius Varro, who himself came from Reate, one of the main places of the Sabines, the Sabine origin of the Quirinal community had gained general acceptance. Now, of course, their god also had to become Sabine and come from the city of Cures, or at least be a Sabine word derived from curis, quiris The founding legend was also adapted to the Roman one by Dionysius of Halicarnassus: just as Mars begat Romulus with the Albanian king's daughter Rhea Silvia, Quirinus begat Modius Fabidius with a virgin from Reate, who then founded Cures together with other men. The introduction of a cult of Quirinus then took place through the Sabine Titus Tatius. Therefore, in the list of sanctuaries drawn up by Varro, there is an altar (ara) of Quirinus on the Quirinal, which had been donated by Tatius. (2) But a second story became more influential, which linked the old legend of the Rapture of Romulus with Quirinus: Romulus had taken the name Quirinus after his deification! Romulus had taken the name Quirinus after his deification! During a storm, Romulus had suddenly disappeared in a cloud. There were even suspicions that he had been eliminated (Livius) and there was great unrest among the people. This unrest was only settled when the highly trustworthy citizen Iulius Proculus declared to the senate under oath that Romulus had appeared to him in war clothing, identified himself as the god Quirinus and demanded the erection of a sanctuary on the Quirinal. The oldest witness that this text of Varro refers to it was Cicero in de re publica, where he writes that he was worshipped on the Quirinal. He repeated this 10 years later, from which one can conclude that this view was not yet established at that time (Roscher). But in the following period, this idea gained complete victory, favoured by the rulers of the time, and since Augustan times, the identity of Quirinus with Romulus has been common knowledge in poetry and historiography (especially Virgil, Ovid). Temples and worship In 263 BC, the consul L. Papirius Cursor consecrated the temple of Quirinus on the Quirinal, which his father had vowed to build, and decorated it with the spoils of war he had taken from the Samnites (Livius, Pliny). This temple was struck by lightning in 206 and burnt down in 49 (Cass. Dio). It was provisionally restored and in 46 the Senate placed in it a statue of Caesar with the inscription θεω ανικητω (the invincible god). The choice of this place had as its premise the equation of the god with the founder of the city (Roscher). In 16 BC Augustus then erected the magnificent new building, which existed until the end of antiquity. Before Papirius built the temple, the sacellum Quirini (small shrine) near the porta Quirinalis, mentioned by Festus, existed from the earliest times and was perhaps identical with the ara mentioned by Varro and donated to Quirinus by Titus Tatius. The same applies to the fact that Octavian was occasionally referred to as Quirinus, i.e. as the old, venerable Romulus, before he assumed the title of Augustus, and was also expressed in the decoration of his temple of Quirinus in whose pediment the founders of the city, Remus and Romulus, were depicted. Naturally, the founder of the Quirinus cult was no longer Titus Tatius, but now Numa Pompilius. And since Virgil, Quirinus always appears as the name of the city founder of Rome, as the brother of Remus or the son of Mars, and bears the attributes of Romulus lituus and trabea. And the poets do not speak of Quirinus only after the deification of Romulus, but already of him as a man, child or in the womb (Ovid fast.). Since Cicero he has been regarded as a Roman example of someone who was raised to heaven because of his merits, like among the Greeks Herakles, Asklepios or others. In contrast to his role in poetry, he plays a rather modest role as a god in the cultus of the imperial period. The great age of the cult of Quirinus, however, is attested by the fact that he had a special public priest, the flamen Quirinalis, as otherwise only Juppiter had the flamen Dialis and Mars the flamen Martialis. Apparently this was the highest trinity of gods in Rome at that time, whose flamines appeared first in the order of priestly rank behind the rex sacrorum and were then replaced by the Capitoline trinity Iuppiter-Iuno-Minerva. The feast of Quirinus, the Quirinalia, fell on 17 February (Ovid fast.). With the epithet Quirinus, Mars had a temple in the I. region. Under this name he was worshipped when he was calm (quies) and still, so that he had his temple within the city. As Mars Gradivus, god of war and unrest, he had his temple outside. The derivation from quies, however, was only a folk etymology. The last picture shows the "Quirinal", Luigi Rossini (1790-1857), "I Sette colli di Roma", etching, 1827. The Quirinal has always been the residence of rich Romans. Sources: (1) Plutarch, Romulus (2) Dionysios von Halikarnassos, Antiquitates Romanae (3) Titus Livius, ab urbe condita (4) Ovid, Fastes (5) Ovid, Metamorphoses (6) Marcus Terentius Varro (7) Cassius Dio, Roman History (8) Macrobius, Saturnalia Literature: (1) Benjamin Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon, 1770 (2) Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, Leipzig (3) Der Kleine Pauly, dtv (4) Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic Coinage Online Sources: (1) Wikipedia Best regards Jochen
