History and Provenance

The shields were in the care of the Salii, a college of patrician priests. Each March the Salii processed through Rome in archaic armour, striking the ancilia and performing a leaping war-dance while chanting the Carmen Saliare, a hymn so ancient that classical Romans could barely construe it. The rite marked the opening of the campaigning season and honoured Mars as a god of war and of the farming year. The legend of the single heaven-fallen shield and its eleven decoys, told by Ovid and credited to the counsel of the nymph Egeria, is the mythic frame; the priesthood, the twelve shields and the March procession are attested as functioning institutions across centuries of Roman religion.

The twelve Ancilia were entrusted to the Salii, the "leaping priests" of Mars, twelve patrician youths who each March carried the shields in procession through Rome, dancing and singing the archaic Carmen Saliare, a hymn so old that Roman antiquarians themselves, including Quintilian, reported that its language was barely intelligible even to contemporary priests reciting it. The shields' ritual custody continued through the Republic and into the Empire as a fixture of Roman state religion, tied specifically to the opening and closing of the campaigning season each spring.