BELLONARI, in Antiquity, priests of Bellona, the goddess of wars and battles. The bellonarii pretended to cut and mangle their bodies with knives and daggers in order to pacify the deity; offering their own blood, not that of other creatures, in sacrifice. In the fury and enthusiasm with which they were seized on these occasions, they ran about raving, uttering prophecies, and foretelling blood and slaughter, devastations of cities and revolutions of states; whence Martial calls them turba entheata Bellona. But Lampridius tells us that the emperor Commodus turned the farce into a tragedy, by obliging these priests to cut and mangle their bodies in good earnest.