Roman Festivals of the Dead: Parentalia and Lemuria

Remembering the dead after burial

For Romans, duties towards deceased relatives continued after the funeral. Annual religious festivals gave the living opportunities to honour their ancestors and protect their households from spirits believed to be dangerous. These practices connected family relationships with religion: the dead were absent physically, but still mattered to the living.

Two festivals show different aspects of this relationship. The Parentalia centred on remembrance and offerings to the dead. The Lemuria aimed to remove harmful spirits from the home. Both were mainly family observances, yet both affected public life in Rome.

Parentalia: honouring ancestors

The Parentalia, meaning ‘Ancestral Days’, lasted for nine days, beginning at noon on 13 February and ending on 21 February. Its focus was deceased family members, although remembrance extended to the dead more generally.

Families visited tombs and brought offerings. The Roman poet Ovid, in his poem Fasti, describes a garlanded tile, a sprinkling of grain, a few grains of salt, bread soaked in wine and loose violets. Prayers accompanied these gifts. Such ordinary items make the ritual concrete: honouring an ancestor did not necessarily require an expensive sacrifice.

Ovid explains that the dead valued pietas more than costly gifts. Pietas meant dutiful respect towards gods, family and community. Here, it meant maintaining obligations to deceased relatives through remembrance and religious observance. Larger offerings were possible, but wealth was not the essential measure of devotion.

On 21 February, the festival concluded with the Feralia, a public observance involving offerings at graves and remembrance of the funeral feast. Food therefore linked the living with the dead, rather than serving simply as a gift with a monetary value.

Why remembrance mattered to Rome

The Parentalia was predominantly domestic, but it was not separate from the state. On the first day, a Vestal priestess performed a public blood sacrifice. This public act recognised the importance of remembering the dead beyond individual households.

During the festival, temples were closed, marriages were forbidden and official business was suspended. The period’s association with death made it unsuitable for weddings: a new marriage was not supposed to begin under bad omens. These restrictions also set remembrance apart from ordinary activities across the community.

Romans believed that spirits of the dead could wander among the living. Ovid reports a story in which neglect of the Parentalia brought increased deaths and spirits howling through Rome’s streets and surrounding fields. When honours to the tombs resumed, the disturbances ended. He expresses doubt about the supernatural story himself, so it should not be treated as proof that these events occurred. Its significance lies in the warning it conveys: neglecting the dead could be imagined as a danger to the whole community, not merely one family.

Lemuria: protecting the household

The Lemuria took place on 9, 11 and 13 May: three separate days, not three consecutive days. Its name came from the lemures, restless spirits in Roman belief. Unlike the Parentalia’s emphasis on honouring ancestors, the Lemuria aimed to drive away harmful spirits.

A traditional explanation attributed its establishment to Romulus, as atonement for killing his brother Remus. This was a legendary origin, not a securely established historical event. It linked the festival with a death within a family and the need to respond to its consequences.

Ovid’s account of the Lemuria ritual

In Fasti 5.431–444, Ovid describes a man carrying out the household rite at midnight, when people and animals were quiet. The sequence combined protective gestures, cleansing, offerings and commands:

1. He rose with his feet unbound and made a protective sign with his thumb and closed fingers.
2. He washed his hands in spring water.
3. With his face turned away, he threw black beans and said, ‘With these beans I throw I redeem me and mine.’ He repeated the words nine times without looking back. The spirit was thought to gather the beans and follow unseen.
4. He touched water again and sounded bronze to make a noise.
5. He repeated ‘Ancestral spirit, depart’ nine times. Only then did he look back and consider the rite complete.

The words make the purpose especially clear: the performer sought protection for himself and his family, then ordered the spirit to leave the house. Ovid describes what participants were believed to accomplish; this does not establish how consistently every Roman household performed the rite or how seriously every individual regarded it.

Family rites with public significance

During the Lemuria, as during the Parentalia, temples were closed, marriages were forbidden and official business could not take place. The ritual action was largely private, but the religious calendar affected the wider community.

The strongest distinction is therefore one of purpose, not a simple division between a private festival and a public one. Parentalia sustained relationships with the dead through honour and remembrance; Lemuria sought protection by expelling spirits. Both show that family duties and public religion were closely connected in Roman life.