Paper short abstract:

We will take into consideration two facets of the use of verbena in the Roman ritual: first, its role in the fetial sanction of a treaty (as recounted in Livius I, 24) and then its significance in the syntagm tauri verbenaeque attested in Festus 494L.

Paper long abstract:

A well-known passage by Livius (I, 24) refers the actions to be accomplished before a treaty is sanctioned. The first one consists in the fetial priest asking the king to present the sagmina; this had to be pura, localized in the arx and there harvested by the fetial as graminis herba pura and, finally, it is defined as verbena and was used to touch the head and the hair of the future pater patratus. The semantic field shows a specialization from the general to the particular that we aim to define both from the chronological and the ritual point of view, taking into consideration the whole Livian passage.

In the Roman rite there is a pair of liba (strues and ferctum/fertum) made up by two 'things' that are not specific per se but they express a category inside a wider genus. This not casual ideological feature emerges also in a lemma by Festus (494L): Tauri verbenaeque in comentario sacrorum significat ficta farinacea. This passage confirms the relevance of a pair; in this case the action consists in fingere two products made of flour. Starting from some morphological notations, such as the plural and the asyndeton construction, and taking into consideration Festus 114L (ex farina in hominum figura) and Varro LL VII, 44 (Argei fiunt e scirpeis), we will propose an interpretation for the second element of the pair, verbenae.