Domain: The Roman state, the citizen-body at peace, war become civic order Symbol: Spear, myrtle, the Quirinal Hill Greek Equivalent: None (uniquely Roman)
Overview
Quirinus is one of the oldest and most enigmatic gods of Rome, a deity of the Roman people gathered as a civic body. His name is tied to the Quirites, the Roman citizens in their peaceful, communal capacity — the same people who under Mars become soldiers. Where Mars embodies war waged beyond the walls, Quirinus embodies the martial community turned inward into ordered citizenship, war transmuted into the life of the state.
By long tradition Quirinus was identified with the deified Romulus, Rome's founder and first king. After Romulus vanished from among mortals — carried off in a storm or a mist on the Campus Martius, in the story Rome told itself — he was said to have been raised among the gods and worshipped thereafter under the name Quirinus. In this the god became the city's founder made divine, the origin of Rome enshrined in its pantheon.
The Archaic Triad
Quirinus held a place of the first rank in Rome's earliest religion. Together with Jupiter and Mars he formed the Archaic Triad — the three great gods of the oldest state cult, each with his own flamen among the senior priesthoods. The flamen Quirinalis stood beside the flamen Dialis of Jupiter and the flamen Martialis of Mars, a sign of how central Quirinus once was. In time this ancient triad was eclipsed by the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and Quirinus faded to a dimmer figure — but his rank in the old order records an age when he ruled with the greatest gods.
Sabine Origin and the Quirinal Hill
Quirinus is widely held to be of Sabine origin, absorbed into Roman religion as the two peoples merged in the city's foundation legend. His name gave, or took, its form from the Quirinal Hill, one of Rome's seven, which bore his chief temple and his priest. The hill and the god together preserve the memory of Rome as a fusion of peoples — the Sabine strand woven into the Latin, made permanent in the worship of the god of the united citizen-body.
Related
- Mars — god of war; Quirinus is his civic, peacetime counterpart
- Jupiter — supreme god, fellow member of the Archaic Triad
- Mythology
- Roman Mythology Index