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JOHN KARL EVANS
whole family sat down to enjoy what Hsu describes as a sumptuous meal."
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The Roman counterpart of the Ch'ing Ming is the parentalia. This was a public event occupying a full nine days of the Roman calendar, the thirteenth through the twenty-first of February. As the name itself suggests, it was devoted to the propitiation of one's parents in particular, but Ovid's circumstantial description of the celebration in the Fasti (2.533-570), makes it clear that it extended to the ascendants in general. During this period, when the spirits were again believed to roam freely, the temples were closed, the magistrates laid aside the insignia of their offices, and it was forbidden to marry. On the last day, which was styled the feralia, the entire populace went out to lay offerings before the graves and to banquet with their dead. These meals could be fully as elaborate as the one in which Hsu participated at West Town, but equally, they could be as simple as those which Ahern reports in Ch'i-nan. She remarks that "foods presented at the graves, though potentially edible, are not soaked, seasoned, or cooked; most of them are dry and unpalatable."' At the feralia, Ovid says (Fasti 2.537-539) that "a tile wreathed with votive garlands, a sprinkling of corn, a few grains of salt, bread soaked in pure wine, and loose violets - these are offerings enough.”
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Despite certain procedural differences, the similarity in intent of the two ghost festivals on the one hand, and the Ch'ing Ming and the parentalia on the other, should be readily apparent. These are not by any means, however, the only ritual occasions on which the living attend to the dead in either community. Grave offerings, for example, are regularly to be observed during the Ch'ung Yang festival in the autumn, while generous offerings are normally set before the ancestral tablets on the death-day anniversaries of those ancestors who are personally remembered by at least one member of the family. Birthdays and death-days were usually commemorated by the Romans with sacrifices at the tomb, which were visited yet again at the rosalia and the violaria, the festivals of roses and violets respectively. These took place not on a fixed day but at any time during May or June, the months when these flowers bloom in the Mediterranean basin. This hints at the antiquity of the belief that