Salii

Salii, the Salian priests at Rome, so called from the verb salire, ‘to dance’. They were an ancient college of twelve, later twenty-four, priests of Mars; they were required to be of patrician birth and have both parents living. They wore a striking costume consisting of the old (perhaps Bronze Age) Italian war-dress, with sword, bronze breast-plate, short military cloak, and the distinctive spiked head-dress, the apex. They carried in their right hands a spear or staff, and on their left arms the sacred figure-of-eight shields, ancilia. They were prominent during March and October (the months that marked the beginning and end of the campaigning season), on certain days going in procession through the city, halting at certain places and performing elaborate ritual dances, beating their shields with their staves and singing the carmen saliare (‘salian song’) in the saturnian metre (see METRE, LATIN 1), a song so ancient that according to Quintilian in the first century AD it had become almost unintelligible even to the priests themselves. A few fragments of it survive. Compare ARVAL PRIESTS.