Culture · Essay
Parentalia: nine days in February, and the cupboard of ancestor faces
For nine days each February Roman families closed the temples, cancelled weddings and ate at their own tombs. On the Feralia, the reconciliation meal that followed it, and the wax portrait masks kept in the hall and worn at funerals.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
For nine days in the middle of February, Rome shut down a considerable part of its public life so that families could go and eat with their dead.
The temples were closed. Magistrates put off the purple-bordered toga. No marriages could take place. On 13 February a Vestal opened the period, and for the following week Romans went out along the roads to the tombs that lined them, because burial inside the city was forbidden and the dead therefore lay in ranks beside every route out of town.
What they did there was domestic. Wreaths of violets, bread, salt, wheat soaked in wine, and a libation poured into the ground or through a pipe built into the tomb for the purpose. Then a meal, the silicernium, eaten at the graveside by the family, with a portion left for the person whose grave it was.
The precision is the interesting part. The Parentalia was for the di parentes, the family's own ancestors: a private obligation, discharged by each household at its own tomb, not a civic rite conducted on everyone's behalf.
The Via Appia. Burial inside the city was forbidden, so the dead lined every road out of it, and the Parentalia meant walking out to your own. Photograph by Gianfranco, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
That distinguishes it from the other Roman festival of the dead. The Lemuria in May dealt with the lemures, the restless and malevolent dead, and its ritual was correspondingly defensive: the head of the household walked barefoot through the house at midnight, spat black beans over his shoulder without looking, and told the spirits to take these and go.
February was for your own people and was affectionate. May was for whatever else was out there and was not.
The nine days closed on 21 February with the Feralia, the one public rite in the sequence, offerings made at the tombs on behalf of the city.
Ovid, who is the main source for all of this in the second book of the Fasti, tells a story about a year when the rites were neglected because Rome was at war. The dead, he says, came out of their tombs and howled through the streets and along the roads, and the city was full of ghosts until the offerings were resumed. It is a good story and it is doing an obvious job: this is what happens if you stop.
The day after, 22 February, was the Caristia, sometimes the Cara Cognatio, the dear kindred. It was a meal for the living members of the family, at which quarrels were supposed to be settled and anyone in an ongoing dispute with a relative was expected to resolve it or stay away.
Look at the order. Nine days with the ancestors, one public rite, then a family dinner at which everybody has to be civil to each other. Rome understood that a festival of the dead is also a mechanism for holding the living together, and it scheduled the two consecutively.
The most striking piece of Roman ancestral practice was not a festival at all. It sat in the hall.
In the atrium of an aristocratic house stood cupboards containing the imagines: wax portrait masks of the family's ancestors, taken from the faces of the dead, each kept with a titulus recording the man's name, offices and achievements, and the whole arranged as a stemma, a branching chart of descent painted on the wall.
They were not ornaments. At a family funeral, actors were hired, given the masks and the appropriate robes of office, and walked in the procession, so that a Roman being buried was accompanied to the forum by his ancestors, in person, in the correct order of seniority. The historian Polybius, watching this as a Greek hostage in Rome, described it as the most impressive thing about the Roman aristocracy and understood exactly what it was for: a young man watching that procession sees the whole line he is expected to live up to, standing in the street.
The right to keep imagines was legally restricted to families that had held curule office, which made the cupboard in the hall a statement of rank as much as of memory. It also meant a family could lose the right, and with it the visible record of who it had been.
Almost nothing of the practice survives directly. The masks were wax, and none is known to exist. The tombs were robbed, quarried and built over. The festival ended with the empire's Christianisation, though the calendar slot did not stay empty for long: the Christian commemoration of the dead ended up in early November instead, where All Souls' Day still is.
What survives is the writing. We know about the Parentalia because Ovid described it in verse, because Roman epitaphs on the roads out of Italy's cities recorded who was buried and who buried them, and because a Greek visitor was sufficiently struck by a funeral procession to write down what he saw.
The wax portraits, kept deliberately, in a cupboard, by families whose whole social position depended on them, are gone. The offhand descriptions are what is left.
Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that Rome took the record seriously enough to industrialise it: a portrait of every ancestor, labelled with what he had done, arranged so a child could see the line, and taken out and walked through the streets whenever the family had a funeral. As a family archive it is close to unimprovable.
The second is that it was made of wax, held privately, and dependent on continuous rank, and that it is entirely lost. The most elaborate memory system in the ancient world could not survive the collapse of the households that maintained it.
The lesson is not that records fail. It is that a record kept in one house, in one form, by one family, is a single point of failure, and that the material matters as much as the intention.
Whose dead