The Story of Consus, God of Stored Grain
At a Glance
- Central figures: Consus, the god of stored grain, whose altar lay buried beneath the earth of the Circus Maximus; Romulus, first king of Rome, who used the god’s festival to stage the abduction of the Sabine women.
- Setting: Rome’s Circus Maximus, in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills, during the earliest years of the city’s founding; drawn from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, and Varro’s De Lingua Latina.
- The turn: Romulus declared a grand festival in honor of Consus - the Consualia - and invited the neighboring Sabine people to attend, using the sacred games as cover for seizing Sabine women as brides for his wifeless city.
- The outcome: The abduction succeeded, Rome gained the women it needed to survive as a people, and the resulting war with the Sabines ended only when the stolen women themselves intervened to stop the bloodshed.
- The legacy: The Consualia, celebrated twice yearly on August 21 and December 15, when Consus’s underground altar was unearthed, horses and mules were crowned with flowers and rested from labor, and chariot races filled the Circus Maximus.
The altar was underground. That was the first strange thing about Consus - his sacred place in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine sat buried beneath packed earth, invisible for most of the year. No one walking across the floor of what would become the Circus Maximus could see it. Twice a year the flamines dug it out, scraped the dirt from its face, and performed the rites. Then they covered it again.
Varro explained the name: Consus from condere, to store away, to hide. The god of grain stored in underground pits. A deity of concealment, of the wealth that sits in the dark and keeps a city alive through winter. The Romans understood that the most important things - seed grain, reserves, the foundation of survival itself - were the things you buried.
The Grain Pit
Before Rome had granaries of stone, it had pits. Farmers across Latium dug narrow shafts into dry ground, lined them with straw and chaff, and poured in the harvest. Sealed with clay and earth, the grain could last years. A family’s life through the cold months depended on what lay beneath their feet, invisible, untouched until the moment of need.
Consus presided over this act of trust - the decision to put food into the ground and believe it would still be there when you opened the seal. His numen inhabited that sealed darkness. The grain in the pit was under his protection. To open a pit carelessly, to steal from a neighbor’s store, to let moisture or vermin reach the hidden supply - these were offenses against Consus as surely as breaking an oath offended Jupiter.
His altar in the valley reflected the logic perfectly. It was itself a stored thing, buried like grain, brought into the light only at the appointed time. The Vestal Virgins and the flamen Quirinalis - the priest of Quirinus, the deified Romulus - attended his rites. The connection between Consus and Quirinus ran deep, and the reason was a specific day in the city’s first year.
Romulus and the Empty City
Rome had walls. Rome had men. Rome did not have women.
Romulus had drawn followers from across Latium - shepherds, fugitives, younger sons with nothing to inherit. They had built huts on the Palatine, dug a ditch, raised a palisade. But the neighboring peoples refused to give their daughters in marriage to this collection of rough men squatting on a hill. Embassies went out; embassies came back empty-handed. The Sabines, the Caeninenses, the Crustumini - none would deal.
A city without wives was a city with one generation to live. Romulus understood this in the plain terms of a man who counted grain stores. Without women, Rome would eat through its single harvest of men and then starve. He needed a scheme, and the scheme needed a god.
He announced that his men had discovered an ancient altar buried in the valley below the Palatine - the altar of Consus. He declared a festival, the Consualia, with games and horse races to honor the god of hidden things. He sent invitations to every neighboring people. Come, he said. Bring your families. Watch the races.
The Consualia
They came. The Sabines especially came in numbers, curious about the new settlement, eager for a festival. They brought their wives and their daughters. They spread through the valley, found seats along the slopes of the Palatine and Aventine, and watched as riders drove horses through the flat ground between the hills.
The altar of Consus was unearthed for the occasion. Offerings were made - first fruits, libations of wine poured into the ground. Mules and horses stood garlanded with flowers, released from labor for the day, because the animals that carried and threshed the grain belonged to Consus as much as the grain itself. The air smelled of dust and crushed grass and the sweat of horses.
At a signal from Romulus, his men moved. They seized the young Sabine women from the crowd. The men fought. Fathers grabbed for their daughters. But Romulus’s people were armed and ready, and the Sabines had come unarmed to a festival. The women were taken. The Sabine men fled back to their towns, raging and humiliated.
The god of hidden things had presided over an act of concealment. The altar that spent most of its year buried in the earth had been unearthed to cover a plot buried in Romulus’s mind. Whether Consus approved or was merely used, the sources do not say. Livy tells the story plainly, without apology.
The War and the Women
The Sabine king Titus Tatius gathered his forces. War came to Rome’s gates. The fighting reached the valley itself - the same ground where the races had been run - and the two sides were locked in combat when the stolen women, now mothers, now Roman wives, ran between the battle lines with their infants.
They begged their fathers to stop. They begged their husbands to stop. They said they would not survive as either widows or orphans. The fighting ceased. Romulus and Titus Tatius agreed to rule Rome jointly, and the Sabines merged with the Romans into a single people.
The valley where all of this happened - the abduction, the battle, the reconciliation - became the Circus Maximus. And at its heart, beneath the racing surface, Consus’s altar remained buried, waiting for the twice-yearly moment when the earth would be scraped back and the god brought into the light.
The Twice-Yearly Unearthing
The Consualia of August 21 fell after the harvest, when the grain had been gathered and the pits sealed. The Consualia of December 15 fell when the stored grain was being opened and consumed through winter. The two festivals marked the two halves of Consus’s purpose - the hiding and the revealing, the storing and the spending.
On both days, horses and mules were crowned and rested. Chariot races ran in the Circus. The flamen Quirinalis and the Vestals performed sacrifices at the unearthed altar. Then the dirt went back over it, and Consus returned to the dark.
The Romans never built him a grand temple above ground. That would have missed the point. Consus belonged below, with the seed grain and the silent reserves, with everything a city buries in order to survive.