Quirinus

Quirinus (Latin: Quirinus) was one of the three sovereign divinities constituting the archaic Capitoline Triad of primitive Roman religion, alongside Jupiter and Mars. Honored with one of the three flamines maiores (the Flamen Quirinalis), who enjoyed sacred status and privileges equal to those of the Flamen Dialis and the Flamen Martialis, Quirinus personifies the civic commonwealth of Roman citizens assembled in peacetime (the Quirites), organized within their thirty ancestral curiae. Within Rome's mytho-political tradition, a foundational theological consensus arose identifying Quirinus as the deified person of Romulus, transformed into an immortal divinity following his mysterious disappearance during a sudden storm at the Goat's Marsh (Caprae Palus). Whereas Mars embodied martial aggression and foreign warfare (the army of milites on the battlefield), Quirinus represented civil harmony, the agricultural vitality of the Italian countryside, and the constitutional cohesion of the citizenry at peace within the pomerium. The priestly college of his flamen fulfilled decisive liturgical responsibilities not only at the annual festival of the Quirinalia (February 17, colloquially styled the 'Feast of Fools' or Stultorum Feriae), but also during the crucial rites of the Robigalia (April 25), when he immolated a puppy and a sheep to ward off destructive crop rust, and the Consualia (August 21), where he officiated with the Vestal Virgins over the underground altar of the grain-storage deity Consus. His primary sanctuary, the Temple of Quirinus on the hill that perpetuated his name (the Quirinal Hill), was dedicated in 293 BC by consul Lucius Papirius Cursor and rebuilt on a monumental marble scale by Emperor Augustus in 16 BC.

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The spear, the civic mantle, the myrtle and the assembled people

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