Argel, in Roman antiquity, thirty human figures made of rushes, thrown annually by the priests or vestals into the Tiber, on the day of the ides of May.—Plutarch, in his Roman Questions, inquires why they are called Argea. There are two reasons assigned. The first, that the barbarous nations who first inhabited these parts cast all the Greeks they could meet with into the Tiber; for Argians was a common name for all Grecians; but that Hercules persuaded them to quit so inhuman a practice, and to purge themselves of the crime by instituting this solemnity. The second, that Evander, an Arcadian, and a sworn enemy of the Argians, to perpetuate that enmity to his posterity, ordered the figures of Argians to be thus cast into the river.