October Horse

The Augustan poets Propertius[25] and Ovid both mention horse as an ingredient in the ritual preparation suffimen or suffimentum, which the Vestals compounded for use in the lustration of shepherds and their sheep at the Parilia. Propertius may imply that this horse was not an original part of the preparation: "the purification rites (lustra) are now renewed by means of the dismembered horse".[26] Ovid specifies that the horse's blood was used for the suffimen.[27] While the blood from the tail was dripped or smeared on the sacred hearth of Rome in October, blood or ashes from the rest of the animal could have been processed and preserved for the suffimen as well.[28] Although no other horse sacrifice in Rome is recorded, Georges Dumézil and others have attempted to exclude the Equus October as the source of equine blood for the Parilia.[29]

Another important ingredient for the suffimen was the ash produced from the holocaust of an unborn calf at the Fordicidia on April 15, along with the stalks from which beans had been harvested.[30] One source, from late antiquity and not always reliable, notes that beans were sacred to Mars.[31]

Suffimentum is a general word for a preparation used for healing, purification, or warding off ill influence. In his treatise on veterinary medicine, Vegetius recommends a suffimentum as an effective cure for draft animals and for humans prone to emotional outbursts, as well as for driving off hailstorms, demons and ghosts (daemones and umbras).[32]

The two-horse chariot races (bigae) that preceded the October Horse sacrifice determined the selection of the optimal victim. In a dual yoke, the right-hand horse was the lead or strongest animal, and thus the one from the winning chariot was chosen as the most potent offering for Mars.[59]

Chariots have a rich symbolism in Roman culture, but the Romans never used chariots in war, though they faced enemies who did.[60] The chariot was part of Roman military culture primarily as the vehicle of the triumphing general, who rode in an ornamented four-horse car markedly impractical for actual war.[61] Most Roman racing practices were of Etruscan origin,[62] part of the Etruscan tradition of public games (ludi) and equestrian processions.[63] Chariot racing was imported from Magna Graecia no earlier than the 6th century BC.[64]

A curse tablet (defixio) aiming to affect the outcome of a chariot race (4th century), from the Via Appia, outside Porta San Sebastiano, Rome

Images of chariot races were considered good luck, but the races themselves were magnets for magic in attempts to influence the outcome.[65] One law from the Theodosian Code, published in AD 438, prohibits charioteers from using magic to win, on pain of death.[66] Some of the ornaments placed on horses were good-luck charms or devices to ward off malevolence, including bells, wolves' teeth, crescents, and brands.[67] This counter-magic was directed at actual practices; binding spells (defixiones) have been found at race tracks.[68] The defixio sometimes employed the spirits of the prematurely dead to work harm.[69] On Greek racetracks, the turning posts were heroes' tombs or altars for propitiating malevolent spirits who might cause harm to the men or horses.[70] The design of the turning posts (metae) on a Roman race course was derived from Etruscan funerary monuments.[71]

Pliny attributes the invention of the two-horse chariot to the "Phrygians",[72] an ethnic designation that the Romans came to regard as synonymous with "Trojan."[73] In the Greek narrative tradition, chariots played a role in Homeric warfare, reflecting their importance among the historical Mycenaeans. By the time the Homeric epics were composed, however, fighting from chariot was no longer a part of Greek warfare, and the Iliad has warriors taking chariots as transportation to the battlefield, then fighting on foot.[74] Chariot racing was a part of funeral games quite early, as the first reference to a chariot race in Western literature is as an event in the funeral games held for Patroclus in the Iliad.[75] Perhaps the most famous scene from the Iliad involving a chariot is Achilles dragging the body of Hector, the Trojan heir to the throne, three times around the tomb of Patroclus; in the version of the Aeneid, it is the city walls that are circled. Variations of the scene occur throughout Roman funerary art.[76]

Imperial Roman funerary relief showing a spear-bearing Achilles in a lunate biga, dragging the body of Hector, with a winged figure above

Gregory Nagy sees horses and chariots, and particularly the chariot of Achilles, as embodying the concept of ménos, which he defines as "conscious life, power, consciousness, awareness," associated in the Homeric epics with thūmós, "spiritedness," and psychē, "soul," all of which depart the body in death.[77] The gods endow both heroes and horses with ménos through breathing into them, so that "warriors eager for battle are literally 'snorting with ménos.'"[78] A metaphor at Iliad 5.296 compares a man falling in battle to horses collapsing when they are unharnessed after exertions.[79] Cremation frees the psychē from both thūmós and ménos so that it may pass into the afterlife;[80] the horse, which embodies ménos, races off and leaves the chariot behind, as in the philosophical allegory of the chariot from Plato.[81] The anthropological term mana has sometimes been borrowed to conceptualize the October Horse's potency,[82] also expressed in modern scholarship as numen.[83] The physical exertions of the hard-breathing horse in its contest are thought to intensify or concentrate this mana or numen.[84]

In honoring the god who presided over the Roman census, which among other functions registered the eligibility of young men for military service, the festivals of Mars have a strongly lustral character. A lustration was performed in the Campus Martius following the census. Although lustral ceremonies are not recorded as occurring before the chariot races of the Equirria or the October Horse, it is plausible that they were, and that they were seen as a test or assurance of the lustration's efficacy.[85]

Funerary relief depicting the deceased riding a horse and pointing to his head where the Genius resides (2nd century AD)

The significance of the October Horse's head as a powerful trophy may be illuminated by the caput acris equi, "head of a spirited ('sharp') horse," which Vergil says was uncovered by Dido and her colonists when they began the dig to found Carthage: "by this sign it was shown that the race (gens) would be distinguished in war and abound with the means of life."[86] The 4th-century agricultural writer Palladius advised farmers to place the skull of a horse or ass on their land; the animals were not to be "virgin," because the purpose was to promote fertility. The practice may be related to the effigies known as oscilla, figures or faces[87] that Vergil says were hung from pine trees by mask-wearing Ausonian farmers of Trojan descent[88] when they were sowing seed.[89]

The location of sexual vitality or fertility in the horse's head suggests its talismanic potency.[90] The substance hippomanes, which was thought to induce sexual passion, was supposedly exuded from the forehead of a foal; Aelian (ca. 175–235 AD) says either the forehead or "loins."[91] Called amor by Vergil,[92] it is an ingredient in Dido's ritual preparations before her suicide in the Aeneid.

On Roman funerary reliefs, the deceased is often depicted riding on a horse for his journey to the afterlife,[93] sometimes pointing to his head. This gesture signifies the Genius, the divine embodiment of the vital principle found in each individual conceived of as residing in the head, in some ways comparable to the Homeric thumos or the Latin numen.[94]

Pendants of bread were attached to the head of the Equus October: a portion of the inedible sacrifice was retained for humans and garnished with an everyday food associated with Ceres and Vesta. The shape of the "breads" is not recorded. Equines decorated with bread are found also on the Feast of Vesta on June 9, when the asses who normally worked in the milling and baking industry were dressed with garlands from which decorative loaves dangled.[95] According to Ovid, the ass was honored at the Vestalia as a reward for its service to the Virgin Mother, who is portrayed in Augustan ideology as simultaneously native and Trojan.[96] When the ithyphallic god Priapus, an imported deity who was never the recipient of public cult,[97] was about to rape Vesta as she slept, the braying ass woke her. In revenge, Priapus thereafter demanded the ass as a customary sacrifice to him.[98] The early Christian writer Lactantius says that the garland of bread pendants commemorates the preservation of Vesta's sexual integrity (pudicitia).[99] Aelian recounts a myth in which the ass misplaces a pharmakon entrusted to him by the king of the gods, thereby causing humanity to lose its eternal youth.[100]

Horse head pendant in amber (Italic, 5th century BC)

The symbolism of bread for the October Horse is unstated in the ancient sources. Robert Turcan has seen the garland of loaves as a way to thank Mars for protecting the harvest.[101] Mars was linked to Vesta, the Regia, and the production of grain through several religious observances.[102] In his poem on the calendar, Ovid thematically connects bread and war throughout the month of June (Iunius, a name for which Ovid offers multiple derivations including Juno and "youths", iuniores).[103] Immediately following the story of Vesta, Priapus, and the ass, Ovid associates Vesta, Mars, and bread in recounting the Gallic siege of Rome. The Gauls were camped in the Field of Mars, and the Romans had taken to their last retreat, the Capitoline citadel. At an emergency council of the gods, Mars objects to the removal of the sacred talismans of Trojan Vesta which guarantee the safety of the state,[104] and is indignant that the Romans, destined to rule the world, are starving. Vesta causes flour to materialize, and the process of breadmaking occurs miraculously during the night, resulting in an abundance (ops) of the gifts of Ceres. Jupiter wakes the sleeping generals and delivers an oracular message: they are to throw that which they least want to surrender from the citadel onto the enemy. Puzzled at first, as is conventional in receiving an oracle, the Romans then throw down the loaves of bread as weapons against the shields and helmets of the Gauls, causing the enemy to despair of starving Rome into submission.[105]

J.G. Frazer pointed to a similar throwing away of food abundance as a background to the October Horse, which he saw as the embodiment of the "corn spirit". According to tradition, the fields consecrated to Mars had been appropriated by the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus for his private use. Accumulated acts of arrogance among the royal family led to the expulsion of the king. The overthrow of the monarchy occurred at harvest time, and the grain from the Campus Martius had already been gathered for threshing. Even though the tyrant's other property had been seized and redistributed among the people, the consuls declared that the harvest was under religious prohibition. In recognition of the new political liberty, a vote was taken on the matter, after which the grain and chaff were willingly thrown into the Tiber river.[106] Frazer saw the October Horse as a harvest festival in origin, because it took place on the king's farmland in the autumn.[107] Since no source accounts for what happens to the horse apart from the head and tail, it is possible that it was reduced to ash and disposed of in the same manner as Tarquin's grain.[108]

Cupids and a biga, relief panel from a Trajanic Altar of Venus and Mars, later rededicated to Silvanus

George Devereux and others have argued that cauda, or οὐρά (oura) in Greek sources, is a euphemism for the penis of the October Horse, which could be expected to contain more blood for the suffimen.[109] The tail itself, however, was a magico-religious symbol of fertility or power. The practice of attaching a horse's tail to a helmet may originate in a desire to appropriate the animal's power in battle; in the Iliad, Hector's horse-crested helmet is a terrifying sight.[110] In the iconography of the Mithraic mysteries, the tail of the sacrificial bull is often grasped, as is the horse's tail in depictions of the Thracian Rider god, as if to possess its power.[111] A pinax from Corinth depicts a dwarf holding his phallus with both hands while standing on the tail of a stallion carrying a rider; although the dwarf has sometimes been interpreted as the horse-threatening Taraxippus, the phallus is more typically an apotropaic talisman (fascinum) to ward off malevolence.[112]

Satyrs and sileni, though later characterized as goat-like, in the Archaic period were regularly depicted with equine features, including a prominent horsetail; they were known for uncontrolled sexuality, and are often ithyphallic in art.[113] Satyrs are first recorded in Roman culture as part of ludi, appearing in the preliminary parade (pompa circensis) of the first Roman Games.[114] The tail of the wolf, an animal regularly associated with Mars, was said by Pliny to contain amatorium virus, aphrodisiac power.[115] Therefore, a phallic-like potency may be attributed to the October Horse's tail without requiring cauda to mean "penis," since the ubiquity of phallic symbols in Roman culture would make euphemism or substitution unnecessary.[116]

The Mocking of Saint Thomas of Canterbury from the 1426 altarpiece by Master Francke

Plutarch relates that at the conclusion of the Sicilian Expedition (413 BC), among the many humiliations inflicted by the victorious Syracusans on the Athenians was chopping off the manes and tails of their horses:

"The public prisoners were collected together, the fairest and tallest trees along the river bank were hung with the captured suits of armour, and then the victors crowned themselves with wreaths, adorned their own horses splendidly while they sheared and cropped the horses of their conquered foes."[117]

The October Horse sacrifice is part of a complex of meanings surrounding equine mutilation in Europe.[118] It appears notably in the medieval Welsh narrative of Branwen when Efnisien, one of a set of twins, mutilates the horses of the King of Ireland, including cutting "their tails to their backs." A similar act of horse disfigurement as an insult occurs in the Old Icelandic saga of Hrólf Kraki.[119]

In the medieval period, the actual docking of the tail of a knight's horse carried a message of emasculation, defamation, and domination.[120] Dozens of such mutilations are recorded in medieval England after the practice was brought in by the Normans.[121] Tail mutilation was carried out frequently enough that it was criminalized and penalties were set in early medieval Germanic, Scandinavian, and Welsh law.[122] As an indication that the horse tail represented or was associated with the penis, a 13th-century English law condemned a rapist not only to lose his life and limbs but also to have both the genitals and the tail of his horse cut off.[123]

In one of the most striking incidents, on Christmas Eve 1170, four days before Thomas Becket was martyred, an enemy cut off the tail of one of his horses and taunted him with it as a threat.[124] On the Becket altarpiece of Hamburg, one of two known medieval depictions of the scene, the mutilator makes a phallic gesture with the horse's tail.[125] A legend then arose that the descendants of the perpetrator grew tails and earned the insulting nickname caudati, the "tailed ones," which spread to attach itself to all Kentishmen; Greek-speaking Sicilians hurled the insult at the English generally in an incident during Richard the First's crusade (1198–92).[126]

Equine mutilation as a form of insult survived into the early modern era. At Somerset in 1611, a horse was paraded in a skimmington ride, a form of public mockery usually aimed at a sexual offense or adultery. On this occasion, horns were attached to the animal's head, indicating cuckolding, and its ears and the hair of its mane and tail were cut off. The horse, in an instance of transferred epithet, is said to be thus disgraced.[127]

Laocoon spearing the Trojan Horse (Codex Vaticanus lat. 2761)

Timaeus (3rd century BC) attempted to explain the ritual of the October Horse in connection with the Trojan Horse—an attempt mostly regarded by ancient and modern scholars as "hardly convincing."[128] As recorded by Polybius (2nd century BC),

he tells us that the Romans still commemorate the disaster at Troy by shooting (κατακοντίζειν, "to spear down") on a certain day a war-horse before the city in the Campus Martius, because the capture of Troy was due to the wooden horse — a most childish statement. For at that rate we should have to say that all barbarian tribes were descendants of the Trojans, since nearly all of them, or at least the majority, when they are entering on a war or on the eve of a decisive battle sacrifice a horse, divining the issue from the manner in which it falls. Timaeus in dealing with the foolish practice seems to me to exhibit not only ignorance but pedantry in supposing that in sacrificing a horse they do so because Troy was said to have been taken by means of a horse.[129]

Plutarch (d. 120 AD) also offers a Trojan origin as a possibility, noting that the Romans claimed to have descended from the Trojans and would want to punish the horse that betrayed the city.[130] Festus said that this was a common belief, but rejects it on the same grounds as Polybius.[131]

Mars and a horse's head appear on opposite sides of the earliest Roman didrachm, introduced during the Pyrrhic War, which was the subject of Timaeus's book. Michael Crawford attributes Timaeus's interest in the October Horse to the appearance of this coinage in conjunction with the war.[132]

Walter Burkert has suggested that while the October Horse cannot be taken as a sacrificial reenactment against the Trojan Horse, there may be some shared ritualistic origin. The Trojan Horse succeeded as a stratagem because the Trojans accepted its validity as a votive offering or dedication to a deity, and they wanted to transfer that power within their own walls. The spear that the Trojan priest Laocoön drives into the side of the wooden horse is paralleled by the spear used by the officiating priest at the October sacrifice.[133]

Child's sarcophagus (2nd century AD) depicting boyish Cupids driving bigae at the circus

The sacrifice itself took place within the Tarentum precinct "at the Nixae" (ad Nixas), probably an altar to the deities of birth (di nixi), who were invoked as Ilithyis. In 17 BC, these deities received a nocturnal sacrifice at the Saecular Games, which originated at the site as the ludi tarentini.[148] According to Festus, the ludi tarentini were instituted in honor of Mars under Tarquinius Superbus, the Etruscan last king of Rome.[149] Birth deities appear both in the epigraphic record of the 17 BC games and prominently in Horace's Carmen Saeculare, composed for the occasion and performed by a children's choir: "In accordance with rite, open up full-term births, Ilithyia: watch over mothers and keep them calm, whether you are best called Lucina or Genitalis".[150]

The October Horse sacrifice for Mars at an altar for birth deities suggests his role as a patron to young warriors who undergo the symbolic rebirth of initiation ritual, a theme also of the equestrian Troy Game. The emperor Julian mentions the sacrifice of a horse in Roman initiation rites, without specifying further.[151] The Campus Martius continued in the Imperial era to be a place for equestrian and military training for youth. The Temple of Mars Ultor dedicated in 2 BC by Augustus in the Campus became the site at which young men sacrificed to conclude their rite of passage into adulthood when assuming the toga virilis ("man's toga") around age 14.[152] To prove themselves, younger, less experienced drivers usually started out with the two-horse chariots[153] that were used in the October Horse race.[154]

Roman rituals of birth and death were closely related, given the high rate of infant mortality and death in childbirth.[155] Chariot races are the most common scene depicted on the sarcophagi of Roman children, and typically show Cupids driving bigae.[156] The Taurian Games, horse races held in the Campus Martius to propitiate gods of the underworld (di inferi), were instituted in response to an epidemic of infant mortality.[157]

Some scholars think Roman conceptions of Mars were influenced by the Etruscan child-god Maris and the centaur Mares, ancestor of the Ausones.[158] Maris is depicted with a cauldron symbolizing rebirth, and the half-man, half-horse Mares three times underwent death and rebirth.[159] In association with Etruscan-influenced horse-racing festivals, John F. Hall saw Mars as a god having "power over death."[160]

Ad Nixas may, however, refer to a landmark called the Ciconiae Nixae ("Travailing Storks"), which did not exist during the Republican period. In that case, the original site for the sacrifice was likely to have been the Altar of Mars (Ara Martis) in the Campus Martius,[161] the oldest center in Rome for the cultivation of Mars as a deity.[162]

The dismemberment of the horse led to a ritual bifurcation into ceremonies involving the head and tail separately. The tail was speedily transported by foot[163] to the Regia. The route would have crossed east of the center of the Campus Martius, and along the outside of the Servian Wall to the Porta Fontinalis (in present-day Rome, to the northeast of the Altare della Patria). A monumental portico built in 193 BC connected the Porta Fontinalis to the Altar of Mars in the Campus.[164] Once within the walls, the route would have followed the Clivus Lautumiarum up to the Comitium, then along the Via Sacra to the Regia, for about a mile.[165] The blood from the tail was then dripped or smeared onto the sacred hearth. This collocation of divine functions recalls the annual renewal of the fire of Vesta on March 1, the "birthday" of Mars, when laurel was hung on the Regia and New Year's Day originally was celebrated on the archaic Roman calendar.[166]

The head became the object of contention between two factions, residents of the Via Sacra and of the Subura. The battle decided where the head would be displayed for the coming year. If the Suburan faction won, it would be mounted in their neighborhood on the Tower of the Mamilii (Turris Mamilia). If the residents of the Via Sacra won, the head would go to the Regia, formerly the residence of the king, as well as the destination of the tail.

The claim of the Mamilii to the head may be based on their family history, which connected them by marriage to the ruling dynasty of the Tarquins. A Mamilius who was the son-in-law of Tarquinius Superbus had given the expelled king refuge after the monarchy abolished. Despite this questionable beginning, the Mamilii were later known for loyalty and outstanding service to the Republic.[167]

The Subura had equine associations in the Imperial era. Martial mentions mule teams on its steep slope, though normally traffic from draft animals was not permitted within Rome during daylight hours.[168] An inscription found there indicates that the muleteers sought the divine protection of Hercules, Silvanus, and Epona. Silvanus had an association with Mars dating back to the archaic agricultural prayer preserved by Cato's farming treatise, in which the two are invoked either as one or jointly to protect the health of livestock. Epona was the Celtic horse goddess,[169] the sole deity with a Gaulish name whose cult can be documented in Rome.

Exactly where the ceremonial struggle took place, or how, is unclear, but it implies a final procession to either site.[15]

During the era of Wilhelm Mannhardt, J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists, the October Horse was regarded as the embodiment of the "corn spirit", "conceived in human or animal form" in Frazer's view, so that "the last standing corn is part of its body—its neck, its head, or its tail." ("Corn" here means "grain" in general, not "maize".)[170] In The Golden Bough (1890), Frazer regarded the horse's tail and blood as "the chief parts of the corn-spirit's representative," the transporting of which to the Regia brought the corn-spirit's blessing "to the king's house and hearth" and the community.[171] He conjectured that horses were also sacrificed at the grove of Diana Nemorensis at Aricia, as a mythic retaliation because the resurrected Virbius, the first divine "King of the Wood" (the priest called rex nemorensis), had been killed by horses—an explanation also of why horses were banned from the grove. As early as 1908, William Warde Fowler expressed his doubts that the corn-spirit concept sufficiently accounted for all the ritual aspects of the Equus October.[172]

Dumézil argued that the October Horse preserved vestiges of a common Indo-European rite of kingship, evidenced also by the Vedic ashvamedha and the Irish inaugural sacrifice described by Giraldus Cambrensis as taking place in Ulster in the early medieval period.[173] Perhaps the most striking similarity between the Vedic ritual and the Roman is that the sacrificial victim was the right-hand horse of a chariot team,[174] though not the winner of a race in the Vedic rite.[175] The head in the ashvamedha, signifying spiritual energy, was reserved as a talisman for the king afterwards; the middle of the horse embodied physical force; and the tail was grasped by the officiant and represented the fertility of livestock.[175]

A trace of horse sacrifice might be detectable among the continental Celts in the personal name Epomeduos, meaning "Horse Sacrificer" in one interpretation of the name, found on silver coins of the Arverni in Gaul.[176] But no race was involved in the medieval Celtic ritual; the horse, a mare who seems to have been the sexual surrogate of the goddess of sovereignty, was consumed communally by king and people from a cauldron in which he was immersed and inaugurated. (In the ashvamedha, the gender of horse and human is reversed.) Both the chariot race and an implied cauldron of initiation (to the extent that the latter might be relevant to the October Horse through the comparanda of the Troy Game and Mars' assimilation to the child-god Maris) are generally regarded as the elements of the Roman festival most likely to be Etruscan, and thus of uncertain value as to an Indo-European origin,[177] though the regenerative cauldron occurs in the Welsh Branwen as well as the Irish kingship ritual.[127]

Some fundamental differences between the Roman rite and the Vedic and Celtic forms pose obstacles to situating the Equus October within the trifunctional schema.[178] The equus is sacrificed to the Roman god of war, not kingship. Dumézil's follower Jaan Puhvel deals with the Roman rite only glancingly in his essay "Aspects of Equine Functionality," exploring mainly the Vedic and Celtic evidence for an "Indo-European equine myth" that "involves the mating of a kingship-class representative with the hippomorphous transfunctional goddess, and the creation of twin offspring belonging to the level of the third estate."[179]

Puhvel finds few linkages between the October Horse and the ásvamedha, primarily because the method of killing the horse differs so dramatically, and the crucial element of ritual mating is absent. He observes, however, that "the absence of the sexual element in Roman horse sacrifice is no surprise, for early Roman ritual is exceedingly nonerotic"—an avoidance he attributes to the Romans' desire to differentiate their sexual probity from the supposed license of the Etruscans.[180]

In Homo Necans, Walter Burkert saw the October Horse as a "sacrifice of dissolution" (hence his willingness to entertain the ancient tradition that associated it with the Fall of Troy), and the struggle for the head as an agon, a competitive contest that vents violence and rage, as do funeral games.[181]

In 46 BCE, discontent arose among the troops supporting Julius Caesar in the civil wars. His lavish public expenditures, they complained, came at their expense: Instead of raising the army's pay, Caesar was using his newly confiscated wealth for such displays as a silk canopy to shelter spectators at the games he staged. The disgruntled soldiers rioted. Caesar came upon them, and shocked them back into discipline by killing one on sight. According to Cassius Dio, the sole source for the episode:

Two others were slain as a sort of ritual observance (hierourgia, ἱερουργία). The true cause I am unable to state, inasmuch as the Sibyl made no utterance and there was no other similar oracle, but at any rate they were sacrificed in the Campus Martius by the pontifices and the priest of Mars, and their heads were set up near the Regia.[182]

Both Wissowa[183] and Dumézil[184] read Dio's sardonic take on these events to mean that an actual sacrifice occurred with human victims replacing the October Horse. The two killings have no common elements other than the site and the display of the heads at the Regia, but the passage has been used as evidence that the flamen of Mars[185] presided over the October Horse as well, even though the officiant is never mentioned in sources that deal explicitly with the Equus. Human sacrifice had always been rare at Rome, and had been formally abolished as a part of public religion about fifty years earlier. Some executions took on a sacral aura, but Dio seems to regard the soldiers' deaths as a grotesque parody of a sacrifice, whatever Caesar's intent may have been.[137] Jörg Rüpke thought that Dio's account, while "muddled", might indicate that Caesar as pontifex maximus took up the Trojan interpretation of the October Horse, in light of the Julian family's claim to have descended directly from Iulus, the son of the Trojan refugee Aeneas.[186] In Colleen McCullough's novel The October Horse, it is Caesar himself who becomes the sacrificial victim, on the Ides of March rather than the Ides of October when the Equus was sacrificed.