Definition: The identity of Anna Perenna is a mystery. Ovid tells two stories about her, but they may be his inventions. In one, Anna Perenna was an old woman who gave cakes to the plebeians when they seceded (494 B.C.). In the other, she is Dido's sister who was driven from Carthage to Latium after Dido's suicide. In Latium, Anna Perenna incurred the wrath of Aeneas' wife, fled, and was carried off by Numicus, god of a stream. When Aeneas' servants went out searching for her, they followed her tracks to the river bank where they discovered she had been turned into a water nymph.
In Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison says the name Anna Perenna is composed of two parts that relate to the Latin for year because she was a new year deity. Plebeians celebrated Anna Perenna and the new year, on the Ides of March, with a picnic, song, dance, and drink in the Campus Martius and in huts made of stakes and branches. Robert Palmer says this celebration was at the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, along the Tiber River.
Reference:
- "Studies of the Northern Campus Martius in Ancient Rome," by Robert E. A. Palmer; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 80, No. 2 (1990), pp. i-vii+1-64
