The duel headed god, Janus acted as an intermediary between gods and mortals. With one head looking backwards and the other to the future, Janus was also the guardian of thresholds and beginnings and endings. These attributes made him the perfect Roman god of the New Year.
The whole of the month of January was Janus’s month. The first day of January was specifically sacred to him. So too was the 9th of the month, when the Romans celebrated the Agonalia Ianuariasin his honor. So what was this obscure festival? And how did the Romans view Janus’s role at the beginning of each New Year?
The Agonalia Ianuarias.
Janus was one of only a few deities honored with an agonalia during the Roman calendar. On these occasions, the Rex Sacrorum, the‘King for Sacred Rites,’sacrificed a ram at the Regia at the east end of the forum Romanum.
The exact meaning of the ritual of the agonalia is lost. Ovid suggested that the name derives from either the act of driving the ram to the sacrifice (agantur) or from the sacrifice itself, since the Latin for beast is agonia. Festus lends weight to this explanation when he also describes agonia as the ancient term for sacrifice.
So why was Janus accorded this honor? Ovid gives a clue when he describes the Agonalia Ianuariasas the day when ‘Janus was placated.’To understand this further, it is worth considering the god’s attributes and associations.
The God of Beginnings and Endings.
The Romans portrayed Janus as a bearded dual-headed god, bearing a staff in his right hand and keys in his left. Ovid’s Fasti describes him as formed from chaos at the beginnings of time. As indicated by this description, he was one of the oldest gods. The Carmen Saliarenamed Janus ‘god of gods’ – an indication of his antiquity.
Janus was also the god of beginnings. Varro credited Janus as “the Opener… The Doorkeeper… the Good Creator, the Good God of Beginnings.” In this capacity, he was the initiator. The first day of every month, the kalends,was sacred to him. He was the god of the dawn of the new day and aided in conception, along with the goddess Juno. Janus was also responsible for endings. ‘Only I have the right to turn the hinge,’ he declares in Ovid’s‘Fasti.’
As part of this role, as the god of beginnings and endings, Janus also acted as a barrier. It was customary in times of complete peace to close his original temple in the Roman forum, as a way of containing and preserving the situation by barring war passage across his threshold.
The God of Thresholds
Janus’s name derives from this function of ianuaor opening. On the physical level, this made him the god of all boundaries, including thresholds, gates, and doors. His original sanctuary on the Janiculum Hill had initially been situated on the threshold of Rome itself, making him the gatekeeper of Rome.
But Janus’s boundaries went beyond the physical. He describes himself to Ovid as the janitor of the celestial court–a way of expressing his role as a boundary between gods and mortals. If a worshipper won his favor, all the other gods were available to them. Displease Janus, however, and the doorway was firmly shut. For this reason, the Romans named him first in prayers, and Janus received the first offerings of wine and incense in rituals.
January – The Month of the God of the New Year.
January originally acted as the boundary between the end of one Roman political year and the beginning of the new one for it was the month when one set of consuls stood down and the new ones took up office. However, January was also Janus’s month- hence its name. When Caesar reorganized the Roman calendar, January replaced March as the official first month of the year. This change meant that Janus became the god of the New Year. The Guardian of the threshold of the year was a fitting role for the god of physical and metaphysical thresholds, beginnings and endings.
‘Janus proclaims a happy year’ states Ovid in Fasti I, 63. However, this optimistic hope was only appropriate if Janus’s control of celestial good luck was maintained. So the Romans were careful how they began this particular new month and year. So no harsh words or lawsuits were permitted to mar the first day of the year.
‘Beginnings contain omens,’ Janus warned Ovid, and so the Romans marked the New Year with gifts of dates, figs and honey, to flavor the year ahead with sweetness. And on the 9th, just to be certain, the Romans offered Janus sacrificial sweeteners of his own.
Sources
Ovid Fasti 163-295 Translated and edited by A J Boyle and R D Woodard. Penguin Classics
The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion (2003) Ed Simon Price and Emily Kearns. Oxford University Press: Oxford
Cicero: The Nature of the Gods. Trans. Horace CP McGregor. Penguin Books
Archaic Roman Religion Vol I (1996) Georges Dumezil. Trans Philip Krapp.The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore and London.
Varro, on the Latin language
