Roman

The Roman section covers figures from Roman tradition and Roman versions of Greek myths. Some Roman gods were matched with Greek ones, as Venus was with Aphrodite, but others, such as Janus, have no Greek counterpart. Our main sources are Latin: Livy’s history of Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti.

Gods

Janus is the two-faced god of doors and gates. In Ovid’s Fasti (1.89–144) the god himself explains his form: Greece has no god like him; the ancients called him Chaos, and when the elements separated he took a body, keeping a trace of his old shapelessness in his two faces; he holds a staff and a key, guards the doors of heaven with the Hours, shuts war in and lets Peace out, and like a doorkeeper looks east and west at once. Virgil shows his double-browed image among the ancestral kings in the palace of Latinus and makes him the keeper of the Gates of War, which the consul opens when Rome goes to war (Aeneid 7.180, 7.607–615); Livy says King Numa built the temple of Janus as a sign of war and peace, open when the state was in arms and shut when its neighbours were at peace (Livy 1.19). Venus, the Roman Aphrodite, is the mother of Aeneas and so the ancestress of the Roman people, as Virgil tells it in the Aeneid. Two Latin spirits of the countryside appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (14.623–771): Pomona, a wood nymph devoted to her orchards who shuts out every suitor, and the shape-changing Vertumnus, who wins her by approaching her in disguise, finally as an old woman who pleads his own case. Invidia, Envy, is a personification whose dark cave Minerva visits in the same poem when she wants Aglauros punished (Metamorphoses 2.760–805).

Founders and the early city

Romulus is the founder of Rome in Livy’s first book, which begins with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and goes on to the twins Romulus and Remus, left in a floating cradle by the Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf (Livy 1.4), and the founding of the city. The same book ends with the assault on Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius and her suicide, the outrage that brought down the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, and led to the election of the first two consuls (Livy 1.57–60).

See Also: Janus, Romulus, Lucretia, Venus, Pomona, Vertumnus, Aeneas