Roman religion was organised around moments of agricultural risk, and Flora's moment is the one that gets forgotten. A crop in flower is not yet a crop. Between blossom and set fruit there is a window of a few weeks in which frost, hail, wind or blight can take the whole year, and it is that window Flora governs. She is not a goddess of pretty gardens; she is the goddess of an anxious fortnight.
Her importance is proved by an unglamorous administrative fact: she had a flamen of her own. The flamen Floralis was one of the twelve minor flamens, a priesthood so archaic that Roman scholars of the late Republic were already struggling to explain some of the deities on the list. Whatever her later reputation, she belongs to Rome's oldest stratum.
A temple paid for with grazing fines
The temple near the Circus Maximus was vowed by the plebeian aediles in the 240s BCE, on the instruction of the Sibylline Books, after damage to the crops. Its construction was funded from fines levied on people who had illegally grazed livestock on public land — money taken from those who had eaten the pasture, spent on the goddess who makes it grow.
Games in her honour were held occasionally at first and became annual from 173 BCE, after another failure of the blossom. Roman religious innovation almost always works like this: a specific disaster, a consultation, a vow, and an institution that then outlives its cause by centuries.
The rowdiest festival in the calendar
The Floralia ran from 28 April to 3 May, and it was unlike anything else in the Roman year.
- Spectators wore bright multicoloured clothing rather than the white of most Roman festivals.
- Vetches, beans and lupins were scattered into the crowd, and hares and goats were released in the theatre — both animals proverbial for fertility, and both, notably, harmless in a way the beasts of other games were not.
- The theatrical entertainment was mime, the least respectable Roman dramatic form, performed by women.
- Prostitutes treated the festival as their own, and later sources describe them performing in it.
The best-known anecdote about it concerns the younger Cato, who attended, and whose presence made the crowd too embarrassed to demand that the actresses strip. Told that they were waiting, he walked out of the theatre to loud applause and the show proceeded. Valerius Maximus tells the story to praise Cato's dignity; Martial repeats it in a preface to defend his own obscenity, on the grounds that nobody made Cato come. Two authors, two morals, one incident — and an unusually clear window onto how Romans argued about the propriety of their own religion.
Ovid's two origin stories
Ovid gives her the fifth book of the Fasti and gets two very different things out of her. In the first she explains that she was once the Greek nymph Chloris, seized by the west wind Zephyrus, who married her and gave her dominion over flowers — a Hellenising origin that turns a Latin functional deity into a rape-and-marriage narrative in the Greek manner, and that Botticelli would later paint in the Primavera, showing the transformation happening left to right across the canvas.
The second is more interesting because it is not Greek at all. Juno, furious that Jupiter had produced Minerva without her, asks Flora for help and is given a flower from the fields of Olenus whose touch makes her pregnant with Mars, without any male involvement. Ovid presents this as Flora's own account, and it is a variant, not the standard genealogy — the Roman family tree follows the usual line in which Mars is the son of Jupiter and Juno. But it is a striking piece of specifically Roman mythmaking, in which the god of Roman war is conceived by a flower.
Flora and fauna
Her most consequential afterlife is a technical term. Linnaeus published Flora Suecica and Fauna Suecica in the mid-1740s — catalogues of the plants and animals of Sweden — and from those titles the paired words entered scientific and then ordinary English. Every reference to "the flora and fauna" of a region is a Roman blossom-goddess and an Italic woodland power doing duty as biological taxonomy.
Her root is everywhere else too: floral, florist, florid, flourish, florin (from the lily on the Florentine coin), and Florida, named by Ponce de León in 1513 partly for the Spanish Easter season Pascua Florida. Flora remains a live given name across Europe and is one of the Roman divine names still given to actual children.
Questions people bring to Flora
Was she really Sabine?
Varro included her in a list of gods introduced by the Sabine king Titus Tatius, and that list is repeated in modern handbooks as though it were a record. It is not; it is a first-century BCE antiquarian's reconstruction, several of whose entries are demonstrably doubtful, and the whole "Sabine gods" tradition may reflect a Roman theory about their own origins rather than an actual history of importation. Flora is certainly old and certainly Italic. Whether she came from the Sabines is Varro's opinion.
Did the goats and hares get hurt?
The sources describe them as being released for the crowd to chase, which in a Roman theatre would not have ended well for the animals. The point of the choice is fertility symbolism rather than cruelty, and the Floralia is consistently described as an occasion without the killing of large beasts that marked other games. It sits at the mild end of Roman public spectacle, which is a low bar.
Is the story that she was a rich prostitute true?
That story — that Flora was a courtesan who left her fortune to the Roman people, who then invented a goddess to justify honouring her — comes from Lactantius and other Christian polemicists writing to discredit the old religion, and it is best read as hostile rationalisation. The temple's funding from grazing fines and the existence of an archaic flamen both point the other way. What is true is that the festival's tone gave the accusation something to work with.
What did farmers actually do for her?
Beyond the public games, very little is recorded — which is normal, since rural practice rarely got written down. The agricultural writers deal with blossom-time in practical terms: smoke against frost, pruning, protecting bees. Flora is also connected with honey, and Ovid has her claim credit for it, which fits: bees and blossom are the same few weeks of the year, and a beekeeper watching the flowering has exactly the same interests as a fruit-grower.