He was discovered by shepherds or the goddess Cybele, who was also known as the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") (narratives differ). In the later Imperial period, the Ides began a "holy week" of festivals celebrating Cybele and Attis, being the day Canna intrat ("The Reed enters"), when Attis was born and found among the reeds of a Phrygian river. The ritual may have been a new year festival representing the expulsion of the old year. This observance, which has aspects of scapegoat or ancient Greek pharmakos ritual, involved beating an old man dressed in animal skins and perhaps driving him from the city. One source from late antiquity also places the Mamuralia on the Ides of March. The day was enthusiastically celebrated among the common people with picnics, drinking, and revelry. In addition to the monthly sacrifice, the Ides of March was also the occasion of the Feast of Anna Perenna, a goddess of the year (Latin annus) whose festival originally concluded the ceremonies of the new year.
The Flamen Dialis, Jupiter's high priest, led the "Ides sheep" ( ovis Idulis) in procession along the Via Sacra to the arx, where it was sacrificed. The Ides of each month were sacred to Jupiter, the Romans' supreme deity. Panel thought to depict the Mamuralia, from a mosaic of the months in which March is positioned at the beginning of the year (first half of the 3rd century AD, from El Djem, Tunisia, in Roman Africa)
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