(fb)

ECSTATIC FOR AESTATIS! ON THIS DAY IN ANCIENT HISTORY/ROME: 27 June: Festival of Initium Aestatis Today is the Roman festival of the beginning of summer. It is the sacred feast day of Aestas, the tutelary goddess of summertime. She is an obscure goddess mentioned by Ovid (Metam. II. 24): “here Summer (Aestas) stood naked and adorned with Garlands made of the Ears of Corn attending Sol, the Sun God.” Pliny the Elder wrote that the Summer Solstice occurs when the Sun is in the eighth degree of Cancer. To the Romans, the first day of Summer was regarded as taking place on the forty-eighth day following the Vernal equinox, which he observes as the day when the Sun enters the 8th degree of Aries.🐏 According to the modern astronomical calendar, the Sun enters the 1st degree of Aries on the Vernal equinox. This would put the Romans' first day of Summer on the 7th of May; however, Silvius, considers the first day of Summer to be the 27th of June. Aestas’s name is the root of the English word aestival, or estival, which means “of summer,” or “in summer.” The mosaic is of Summer. Villa Dar Buc Ammera, Libya, Roman era mosaic of the four seasons (fb)