Xii Kal. Iun. (June 20). C.
Summan AD Circ[um] Maxim[um]. (Ven. Esq. Amit.)
To this note may be added that of Ovid655:
Reddita, quisquis is est, Summano templa feruntur,
Tum cum Romanis, Pyrrhe, timendus eras.
The date of the foundation of the temple of Summanus was probably between 278 and 275 B.C.656; the foundation was the result of the destruction by lightning, no doubt at night, of a figure of Jupiter on the Capitol657. Who was this Summanus? Ovid’s language, quisquis is est, shows that even in his time this god, like Semo Sancus, Soranus, and others, had been fairly shouldered out of the course by more important or pushing deities. In the fourth century A.D. S. Augustine658, well read in the works of Varro and the Roman antiquarians, could write as follows: ‘Sicut enim apud ipsos legitur, Romani veteres nescio quem Summanum, cui nocturna fulmina tribuebant, coluerunt magis quam Iovem—sed postquam Iovi templum insigne ac sublime constructum est, propter aedis dignitatem sic ad eum multitudo confluxit, ut vix inveniatur, qui Summani nomen, quod audire iam non potest, se saltem legisse meminerit.’ In spite of the decay and disappearance of this god we may believe that the Christian Father has preserved the correct tradition as to his nature when he tells us that he was the wielder of the lightning of the night, or in other words a nocturnal Jupiter. We do in fact find a much earlier statement to the same effect traceable to Verrius Flaccus659. Varro also mentions him and classes him with Veiovis, and with the Sabine deities whom he believed to have been brought to Rome by Tatius660. There is, however, no need to suppose with Varro that he was Sabine, or with Müller that he was Etruscan661; the name is Latin and probably = Submanus, i. e. the god who sends the lightning before the dawn.
It is interesting to find the wheel symbol here again, as is noticed by Gaidoz in his Studies of Gallic Mythology662. We can hardly doubt that the Summanalia which Festus explains as ‘liba farinacea in modum rotae ficta663‘, were cakes offered or eaten on this day: it is hard to see what other connexion they could have had. Mr. Arthur Evans has some interesting remarks664 on what seem to be moulds for making religious cakes of this kind, found at Tarentum; they are decorated, not only with the wheel or cross, but with many curious symbols. ‘It is characteristic,’ he writes, ‘in a whole class of religious cakes that they are impressed with a wheel or cross, and in other cases divided into segments as if to facilitate distribution. This symbolical division seems to connect itself with the worship of the ancestral fire rather than with any solar cult. In a modified form they are still familiar to us as “hot-cross buns.”’ Summanus, however, does not seem to have had anything to do with the ancestral fire.