The Myth of Pales, Goddess of Shepherds

At a Glance

Central figures: Pales, the Roman deity of shepherds, flocks, and pastureland; the shepherds and farmers of the Palatine Hill and surrounding countryside.
Setting: The Palatine Hill and the grazing lands of early Latium, as recorded in Ovid’s Fasti and Varro’s De Re Rustica; the annual festival of the Parilia held on April 21.
The turn: A murrain strikes the flocks on the Palatine, and the shepherds, unable to stop the sickness by ordinary means, turn to the rites of Pales - purification by smoke, water, and fire.
The outcome: The flocks recover, the pastures are restored, and the shepherds’ ritual becomes fixed in the calendar as the Parilia, repeated every April 21 to purify herds and land alike.
The legacy: The Parilia became one of Rome’s oldest festivals, so old that later antiquarians noted April 21 also marked the traditional founding date of the city itself - the birthday of Rome layered on top of a shepherds’ rite of purification.

The sheep began dying on the third day after the Nones of April. One ewe dropped in the morning, stiff-legged and bloated. By afternoon three more had gone down in the same pasture near the foot of the Palatine, their wool matted with a yellowish crust around the eyes. The shepherd Faustulus - not the famous one of Romulus’s story, but a man of the same name and the same hill, as common among Roman shepherds as Marcus among senators - dragged the carcasses to the edge of the stream and burned them. The smoke was black and wrong-smelling. His flock would not graze near the spot for days.

By the following week the murrain had spread to neighboring herds. Lambs born that spring sickened within hours. Goats refused water. The pastures themselves seemed spoiled - the grass grew but the animals turned from it, as if the ground had been salted. Faustulus and the other shepherds of the Palatine knew what this was. They had seen it before, or their fathers had. The land needed purifying. The flocks needed Pales.

The God of the Threshold Between Wild and Tame

Pales was not a god you could describe. The Romans themselves were uncertain whether Pales was male or female - Varro said female, others said male, and some antiquarians noted that the name might refer to a pair of deities, one of each. This ambiguity did not trouble the shepherds. They did not need Pales to have a face. They needed Pales to have a function.

And the function was this: Pales governed the boundary between the wild hillside and the fenced pasture, between sickness and health in livestock, between a flock that thrived and one that wasted. Every shepherd in Latium knew that flocks were fragile. A disease could move through a hundred animals in a week. Wolves took the strays. Drought turned good grass to dust. Pales stood watch over all of this - the numen that kept the green world productive, the invisible force that made pastureland different from wasteland.

There was no grand temple to Pales on the Capitoline, no great cult statue carved from Parian marble. Pales lived in the open air, at the edge of the sheepfold, in the smoke that rose from burning sulfur and rosemary. The shepherds prayed to Pales not in temples but standing in their own fields, facing east, their hands wet with dew.

The Preparation of the Suffimen

When the murrain had taken a tenth of the flocks on the Palatine, the shepherds gathered to prepare the suffimen - the substance of purification. The recipe was exact, passed from generation to generation with the fixity of law.

First, a Vestal Virgin provided the ashes from the previous year’s Fordicidia, the festival in which pregnant cows were sacrificed and their unborn calves burned. These ashes were mixed with the dried blood of the October Horse - the animal sacrificed at the close of the military season in the Campus Martius, its tail-blood collected and stored by the Vestals through the winter. To this they added beanstraw stalks, which burned clean and fast.

The result was a grey powder that smelled of nothing the nose could place - not animal, not vegetable, not mineral, but something older. The shepherds carried it in clay bowls to each of the seven hills where flocks grazed.

This mixing of materials from different festivals - the Fordicidia of April 15, the October Horse sacrifice from the previous autumn - was characteristic of Roman religion. Nothing stood alone. Every rite drew on materials consecrated at other rites, creating a web of observance that bound the calendar into a single continuous act of maintenance. The shepherds did not think of it in these terms. They thought: we need the suffimen, and the Vestals have it, and April 21 is the day.

Fire on the Palatine

At dusk on the twenty-first, the shepherds built bonfires from dried beanstraw and olive wood in three parallel lines across the pastureland at the base of the Palatine. The fires were close enough together that a man could leap from one row to the next without stopping, and that was precisely the point.

Faustulus drove his surviving flock between the fires first. The sheep balked at the smoke and heat, but the dogs pressed them forward and the animals lunged through, bleating, their wool singed at the tips. The shepherd himself followed, leaping the flames three times. Each pass through the fire was a cleansing. The smoke from the suffimen, scattered across the coals, rose into the animals’ wool and nostrils and eyes, and into the shepherd’s too. Whatever the murrain was - whatever invisible rot had settled into the pasture - the fire and the sacred ash were meant to burn it out.

Then came the water. The shepherds sprinkled their flocks with fresh spring water mixed with laurel branches, shaking the drops across the animals’ backs. They washed their own hands four times, facing east each time. They poured milk and heated wine - sapa, grape juice boiled down to a third of its volume - into wooden bowls set on the ground as offerings. The bowls were placed where the sheep would pass over them, so that the animals walked through the offering as through a gate.

The Prayer to Pales

Ovid preserved the words. The shepherd stood in the open field, his flock around him, and prayed:

Pales, be favorable. Forgive me if my flock has grazed on sacred ground, or rested beneath a sacred tree. Forgive me if I have entered a grove I should not have entered, or if my eyes have seen the wood-nymphs bathing. If a wolf has taken a lamb and I have found the wool on a thorn bush, forgive me that too. Let no disease touch my stalls. Let the wool come heavy and the milk come sweet.

The prayer covered every possible offense. Roman religion operated on the principle that a god might be angered by transgressions the worshipper did not even know about - a flock grazing over an unmarked sacred boundary, a shepherd cutting wood from a grove consecrated to some forgotten numen. The prayer to Pales was a blanket petition: whatever I have done, I did not mean it, and I bring fire and smoke and milk to make it right.

April 21

The flocks survived. Whether the suffimen worked against the disease or the season simply turned, the shepherds credited Pales. The rite was repeated every year on the same date, April 21, and became the Parilia - sometimes spelled Palilia, after the deity’s name.

Centuries later, when Romulus drew his furrow around the Palatine to mark the boundary of the new city, the antiquarians noted that he did it on April 21. The birthday of Rome fell on the day of the shepherds’ festival. Whether Romulus chose the date because the Parilia was already sacred, or whether later chroniclers moved one date to match the other, no one could say for certain. Varro recorded both traditions without choosing between them.

What remained was the coincidence - or the intention. Every year on April 21, Rome celebrated both its founding and the purification of its flocks. The bonfires burned on the Palatine. The sheep leapt through the smoke. The city that ruled the known world still kept, at its oldest root, the festival of a shepherd god whose face no one had ever seen.