Rome had three great priests. One served Jupiter, one served Mars, and the third served Quirinus — a god whose original character had already gone obscure by the time anyone in Rome started writing things down about him. The rank is not in doubt: the flamen Quirinalis stood in the first tier of the priesthood, above the twelve minor flamens, in a hierarchy nobody was free to rearrange. What he was the priest of is the problem.
The evidence is his priest's diary, not his myths
Since Quirinus has almost no stories, the best route into him is the list of rites his flamen actually performed, and the list is strange.
- The Quirinalia on 17 February, his own festival.
- The Robigalia on 25 April, at which a red dog and a sheep were sacrificed in a grove five miles out on the Via Claudia to Robigus, the power of wheat rust — a crop-disease rite.
- The Consualia, the harvest-storage festival at the underground altar in the Circus Maximus.
- The Larentalia in December, a rite for Acca Larentia, the woman who in one tradition raised Romulus and Remus.
Not one of those is a war rite. A flamen ranked with Jupiter's and Mars's priests spent his year on grain, storage, crop blight and an old burial ceremony, which is the strongest single argument that Quirinus was not originally a war-god at all, whatever his spear suggests.
The Feast of Fools
The Quirinalia carried a nickname: stultorum feriae, the festival of fools. It fell on the last day of the Fornacalia, the movable oven-festival at which each curia — the archaic subdivisions of the Roman people — roasted its grain on its own appointed day. Anyone who did not know which curia he belonged to, or who had simply missed his day, could make the offering on 17 February with everyone else.
It is a wonderfully unheroic institution: a national make-up date for people who had lost track of their ancestral voting unit, attached to a first-rank god, and named after the people who needed it.
Quirites
The Roman citizen body in its civilian capacity was addressed as Quirites — in laws, in formal speech, and pointedly not on the battlefield, where soldiers were milites. The connection with the god's name is generally accepted, though the direction of derivation is not settled: from co-viria, an assembly of men, is the most-cited proposal, with the Sabine town of Cures and the Quirinal hill itself as rival candidates that ancient writers also offered.
The distinction had teeth. Suetonius reports that when Caesar faced a mutinous legion demanding discharge, he broke them with a single word — addressing them as Quirites, civilians, granting the discharge before they had finished asking for it, and reducing men who wanted to be begged into a crowd of ordinary citizens. Whether or not the anecdote is exact, it only works because every Roman felt the difference between the two words.
The deified founder
By the late Republic, Quirinus is Romulus. After the founder's disappearance at the Goat's Marsh, a senator came forward to swear on oath that the dead king had appeared to him in divine form with a message for the Roman people, and thereafter the identification is standard: Ennius has it, Cicero uses it, Ovid narrates the apotheosis in the Fasti and Livy reports the acclamation.
Whether it is archaic or a rationalisation is a genuine open question. Against antiquity: Quirinus's rites have nothing to do with Romulus, his hill is not the Palatine, and Rome had an obvious motive for wanting a founder who had become a god. For antiquity: the identification is already fixed in the earliest Latin literature, and Rome's oldest triad naturally invited a founder-figure into it. The Roman family tree marks the merger as disputed rather than choosing a side.
Dumézil's theory, and how much weight it can carry
The trio Jupiter–Mars–Quirinus is the foundation of Georges Dumézil's argument that Indo-European societies organised divinity into three functions: sovereignty and law, physical force, and production and community. On that reading Quirinus is the god of the third function, the citizen body as producers, which fits his flamen's agricultural calendar rather neatly.
The theory has been extraordinarily influential and is not accepted as fact. Critics — Arnaldo Momigliano prominent among them — have argued that the scheme is imposed on the evidence rather than derived from it, and that it explains Roman religion by assuming what it sets out to prove. It should be presented as a powerful hypothesis with real explanatory reach and real opponents, which is how any responsible page treats it.
Augustus, and a name not taken
Quirinus mattered to the first emperor. The temple on the Quirinal was rebuilt in 16 BCE on a lavish scale, with a double colonnade whose column count later writers found worth recording. And Suetonius and Cassius Dio both report that Octavian considered taking the name Romulus to signal a second founding, before settling on Augustus — a word from the vocabulary of augury rather than of kingship.
The reason for the retreat is not hard to see. Romulus meant founder, but also king, also fratricide. Augustus meant sanctioned by the birds. A man rebuilding the Republic's façade chose the priestly word.
The president lives on his hill
Quirinus's most conspicuous survival is a political address. The Quirinal Hill kept his name through two thousand years; the palace built on it in the sixteenth century housed popes, then the kings of united Italy, and since 1946 the President of the Italian Republic. Italian newspapers write "the Quirinale" to mean the presidency, in the way that others write the White House or the Kremlin — so an archaic god nobody could define is the everyday metonym for a head of state.
Open questions about Quirinus
Was he a Sabine import?
Varro and others said so, connecting him with the Sabine town of Cures and with the Sabine settlement on the Quirinal, and the tradition of an early Sabine element in Rome's population is old. Modern opinion is divided, partly because the whole "Sabine list" of gods that ancient antiquarians produced is suspected of being a scholarly reconstruction rather than a record. Treat the Sabine origin as a Roman explanation, not an established fact.
Did he have a temple before Augustus rebuilt one?
Yes; a temple on the Quirinal is dated by tradition to 293 BCE, vowed during the Samnite wars and dedicated by the son of the man who vowed it. Ancient writers also mention myrtles growing by it, said to be older still, and a pair of them associated with the patricians and the plebs whose relative vigour was read as an omen for each order.
Is there any surviving image of him?
No securely identified cult statue survives. Coins and reliefs showing a bearded figure with a spear are sometimes assigned to him, usually on contextual grounds, and the identification is rarely certain. This is a common situation for the oldest Roman gods, whose images were made when Rome's own artistic tradition was thin and whose temples were rebuilt repeatedly.
Why does he not appear in the Capitoline triad?
Because the Capitoline arrangement of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva is a later, Etruscan-influenced structure that replaced the older triad in prominence. Roman scholars themselves distinguished the two groupings, and the survival of the three great flamens is the main reason we know the earlier one existed at all — an institution outliving the theology that produced it.