The Myth of Anna Perenna

At a Glance

• Central figures: Anna Perenna, an old woman from Bovillae (or, in alternate tradition, Anna the sister of Dido, queen of Carthage); Mars, god of war; Minerva, goddess of wisdom and craft.
• Setting: Rome and its surroundings, particularly the banks of the Tiber and the grove along the Via Flaminia, as recorded in Ovid’s Fasti (Book III); the sacred date is the Ides of March (March 15).
• The turn: Mars enlists Anna Perenna as a go-between to win Minerva’s love, but Anna substitutes herself - veiled as the bride - on the wedding night, humiliating the god.
• The outcome: Anna Perenna is transformed into a water nymph and takes up residence in the river Numicius (or the Tiber), becoming a deity of the turning year and its renewal.
• The legacy: The festival of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March, when Romans gathered at her grove on the Via Flaminia to drink, sing obscene songs, and pray for as many years of life as cups of wine they could swallow.

The old woman’s name carried the year inside it. Annus - the circle, the turning. Perenna - that which endures, that which comes around again. The Romans held her feast on the Ides of March, the first full moon of the old calendar’s first month, and they drank themselves senseless in a grove beside the Via Flaminia, sprawled on the grass in pairs, counting their cups and praying each one meant another year of life. It was a day for rude songs and open laughter. No solemnity. No togas. Just wine and the sun and the stubborn hope that the year would carry them forward one more time.

But who she was - that the Romans could never quite agree on.

The Woman from Bovillae

Ovid records the simplest version. During the secessio plebis - the withdrawal of the common people to the Sacred Mount, when Rome’s poor marched out of the city and left the patricians to their empty streets - the plebeians were starving. They had no grain. They had removed themselves from the markets and the stores of the city, and the protest cost them their bellies.

An old woman named Anna came from Bovillae, a small town in the Alban Hills south of Rome. She was poor herself but knew how to bake. Every morning she made flat cakes - coarse bread, nothing elegant - and carried them out to the camp on the Sacred Mount. She fed the hungry plebeians, day after day, until the crisis resolved and the tribunes of the plebs were established as officers of the state.

When peace returned, the people did not forget her. They raised Anna to divine status. The flat cakes became part of the ritual offerings at her festival. Her image stood in the grove. She had done nothing miraculous. She had baked bread for people who needed it.

The Sister of Dido

Ovid tells a second version, longer and stranger. In this telling, Anna is Dido’s sister - the same Anna who appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, the confidante to whom Dido confesses her love for Aeneas. After Dido’s suicide on the pyre at Carthage, the city falls to a Numidian king named Iarbas, who had wanted Dido for himself. Anna flees by ship.

She is driven by storms across the Mediterranean. The coast she reaches is Latium. And standing on the shore, she sees Aeneas.

He recognizes her. He weeps for Dido. He takes Anna into his household at Lavinium, gives her rooms, gives her honor, speaks to her of her dead sister with a gentleness that must have been unbearable. But Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia, despises the Carthaginian woman in her home. Anna does not need to be told. She sees the coldness in Lavinia’s face, the thinness of her hospitality.

One night, Dido’s ghost appears to Anna in a dream. The dead queen’s hair is loose and matted, her garments scorched from the pyre.

Flee this house. Flee now.

Anna runs barefoot from the villa in the dark. She stumbles down the riverbank and falls - or throws herself - into the waters of the Numicius, the river that flows through Lavinium’s territory. Aeneas and his men search for her at dawn. They follow her tracks to the riverbank. They find nothing.

Then a voice rises from the water. Anna speaks to them. She tells them she has become a nymph of the river. She calls herself Anna Perenna - the enduring one, the one who flows and returns. Aeneas’s men make offerings at the bank. The cult begins there, on the muddy edge of the Numicius, before it ever reaches Rome.

Mars and the Veil

The third story Ovid tells is the one the Romans sang about at the festival, and it is pure comedy.

Mars falls in love with Minerva. This is already absurd. Minerva is a virgin goddess, sworn and armored, the last deity in the pantheon likely to receive a suitor. But Mars wants what he wants. He goes to Anna Perenna - by now established as a goddess, old and clever - and asks her to act as his go-between.

Anna agrees. She tells Mars she will arrange everything. She visits Minerva. She comes back with encouraging reports. Mars grows eager. A night is set. A room is prepared. The bride arrives, veiled.

Mars lifts the veil.

Underneath is Anna Perenna - wrinkled, grinning, an old woman wrapped in a bridal cloth. Mars recoils. Anna laughs. The whole story becomes the subject of the bawdy songs sung at her festival, the verses that made proper Romans wince and the common people howl. The songs mocked Mars to his face, the war god tricked by a grandmother, the great lover outwitted by an old woman’s joke.

It was, the plebeians understood, exactly the kind of trick an old baker from Bovillae would play.

The Grove on the Via Flaminia

Her sacred grove sat just north of the city along the Via Flaminia, close to the first milestone. On the Ides of March, the area filled with people - not the senatorial class, not the pontifices and flamines, but ordinary citizens. They spread out blankets. They built small shelters from branches. They drank publicly, in the open air, cup after cup, each one a prayer. Give me as many years as cups I drain. Some sang the new songs of the year. Many sang the old ones about Mars and the veil, and the verses grew filthier as the wine went deeper.

There was no procession. No sacrifice of the suovetaurilia type. No magistrate presided. The rites of Anna Perenna belonged to the people, and the people kept them rowdy. Ovid notes that some couples slipped off into the reeds. The day was not about decorum. It was about surviving the winter, reaching the new year’s first full moon, and being alive enough to drink to the next one.

The River That Returns

Her name held the secret of the festival: anna from annus, perenna from perennis - lasting through the years. She was the year’s hinge, the point where old time ended and new time began. March was the original first month of the Roman calendar, and the Ides of March was the first full moon of the first month. Everything started here.

The woman who baked bread for starving plebeians. The sister who fled Carthage and drowned in a Latin river. The old trickster who hid behind a bridal veil. All three Annas circled the same center - survival, return, the stubborn refusal to be finished. The river that carried her name kept flowing past Lavinium. The grove on the Via Flaminia filled each March with ordinary Romans pouring wine on the ground and counting the years they had left.