Ambarvalia was a Roman agricultural fertility rite held at the end of May in honour of Ceres.
At these festivals they sacrificed a bull, a sow, and a sheep, which, before the sacrifice, were led in procession thrice around the fields; whence the feast is supposed to have taken its name, ambio, I go round, and arvum, field. These feasts were of two kinds, public and private. The private were solemnized by the masters of families, accompanied by their children and servants, in the villages and farms out of Rome. The public were celebrated in the boundaries of the city, and in which twelve fratres arvales walked at the head of a procession of the citizens, who had lands and vineyards at Rome. During the procession, prayers would be made to the goddess.
Ambarvalia was a Roman agricultural fertility rite held at the end of May in honour of Ceres.
At these festivals they sacrificed a bull, a sow, and a sheep, which, before the sacrifice, were led in procession thrice around the fields; whence the feast is supposed to have taken its name, ambio, I go round, and arvum, field.
Scaliger, in his notes on Festus, maintains the ambarvalia to be the same as amburbia.
His Homeric pastoral The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosicli, afterwards rechristened Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), was inspired by a long vacation after he had given up his tutorship, and is full of socialism, reading-party humours and Scottish scenery.
Ambarvalia (1849), published jointly with his friend Thomas Burbidge, contains shorter poems of various dates from 1840, or earlier, onwards.
His only considerable enterprise in prose was a revision of the 17th century translation of Plutarch by Dryden and others, which occupied him from 1852, and was published as Plutarch's Lives (1859).
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