Hi,
I’m writing an article discussing claims that intelligently made artifacts have fallen from the sky. It’s not a UFO study, you can call it Fortean, folkloric, even a sociological study. I do not personally believe in most of the tales I collect though I like to keep an open mind. Virtually all cases turn out to be fiction, which interests me just the same.
One of the events I am researching happened in ancient Rome, when the second king, Numa Pompilius, was in power. The story is well-known. A shield fell from the sky (the ancile, or ancilia, or buckler - translations differ). To help prevent it from being stolen, Numa made 11 copies and assigned a special group of priests to look after it.
I know the story, I have some of the original sources (Ovid, etc). My doubt, however, is as follows: which god threw it down, Jupiter or Mars? Of three original sources I have, two state it was Jupiter and one does not mention which god it was. But a surprising number of books and mythological dictionaries claim Mars threw it down. One source says a prophecy was written on it but I can’t find any support for that. What I need is to find out which, if any, Roman writer said it was from Mars (a negative would mean a lot of modern writers have made a mistake).
Anyone know any better?
I promise I’ll make future posts more interesting, but this thing has been bugging me for a while.
Thanks,
Chris
I did a quick search on the Perseus Project, and didn’t find much. There is this, however, which talks about the big procession of ancilia for Mars every year:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0062&query=id%3Dsalii#id,salii
Perhaps that’s where the writers were getting the association with Mars.
The Greeks, of course, associated the aegis with Zeus, anmd the aegis, evenm in the ancient world, was confusingly described as either a shield or a breastplate or both, so the association of the ancilia with Jupiterr isn’t surprising.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to find modern writers confusing the sky=fallen shield with thye ones in the procession of Mars. I’ve seen many cases where writers were either mistaken or else, lured by the common use of the words ancile and ancilia, to assert a connection that’s not really there.
Thanks for bringing this up – I’ve never heard this story before.
Right, it’s these ancilia which were supposedly copies of the one that fell.
I have collected about 150 stories of objects that fell from the sky over the centuries, or were said to - from meteorites shaped like arms and heads, to actual swords and aerolites containing extraterrestrial remains. I run a project dealing with early stories like this but sometimes I just can’t get at the sources I need.
Check out our project at http://anomalies.bravepages.com/main.htm It’s free so I’m not plugging anything!
Cheers,
Chris