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Venus Verticordia

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Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1868), Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

Venus Verticordia ("Changer of Hearts"[1] or "Heart-Turner"[2]) was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus conceived as having the power to convert either virgins or sexually active women from dissolute desire (libido) to sexual virtue (pudicitia).[3] Under this title, Venus was especially cultivated by married women, and on 1 April the Veneralia festival was celebrated in her honor.[4]

The epithet Verticordia derives from the Latin words verto, "turn", and cor, the heart as "the seat of subjective experience and wisdom".[2] The conversion, however, was thought of as occurring in the mind – the mens or "ethical core".[2] Women were thus viewed as having the moral agency necessary for shaping society, albeit in roles differing from men.[2]

In Roman state religion

Republican denarius depicting Venus Verticordia on the reverse, holding a balance scale and a sceptre with a small Cupid in attendance;[5] the Dioscuri appear on the obverse (issued 46 BC)
Woodcut illustrating reconstructed detail

The cult of Venus Verticordia was established with the installation of a statue around the time of the Second Punic War,[5] before 204 BC,[6] possibly 220 BC.[2] Its initial location is not known. Similarly to the legislative process for establishing other women-centered cults such as that of Fortuna Muliebris or the religious reparations owed to Juno Regina in 207 BC,[7] the senate compiled a list of one hundred matronae (married women) eligible to make the dedication, then narrowed their number by sortition (drawing lots) to ten. The ten women themselves nominated a Sulpicia as the most worthy of the honor among them.[6][8] Pliny the Elder implies that it was the first time a woman was selected for an official religious task in this way,[9] and says that this process was followed again for the importation of the cult of the Magna Mater by Claudia Quinta.[10] T. P. Wiseman regarded the story of Sulpicia as a myth.[11]

The Temple of Venus Verticordia in Rome was one of eight dedicated to ten different deities, seven of them goddesses, constructed on the authority of the Sibylline Books during the Roman Republic.[12] Work was started in 114 BC. It was the last temple (aedes[13]) the Romans built on Sibylline authority.[14] The cult statue may have been moved there.[citation needed] The temple was located in the Vallis Murcia in Rome.[15] The establishing of a temple was a response to an incident of incestum (violation of religious chastity) involving three of the six women serving as Vestals.[11][16]

The Veneralia

The festival of Veneralia took place on 1 April. Games (ludi) were held.

Participants consumed a slurry of poppy seed, milk, and honey. Poppy evokes a connection to Greek Demeter, perhaps because the Greek equivalent of Verticordia, Aphrodite Apostrophia ("Aphrodite of Turning Away"[a]), was associated with Demeter Erinys.[18][b] The most detailed source on the Veneralia is the opening of Book 4 of Ovid's poem about the Roman calendar, the Fasti, but the word Verticordia is metrically impossible in elegiac couplets and thus can't be used as an epithet for Venus in the passage.[20] Ovid refers to Verticordia, however, in a line that plays on the etymology of the epithet: inde Venus verso nomina corde tenet,[21] "and from her change of heart Venus holds her title."[22]

Notes

  1. ^ Pausanias (9.16.3–4) describes three wooden statues of Aphrodite at Thebes that were said to be of such great antiquity that they had been votive offerings of Harmonia, the wife of the legendary Theban founder Cadmus. One of the three was Aphrodite Apostrophia ("the Rejector" in the 1918 Loeb Classical Library translation), so called because she turned the human race away from acting on desires that were contrary to nomos (ἐπιθυμίας τε ἀνόμου) and unholy deeds (ἔργων ἀνοσίων).[17] Mythological examples of these actions included those of "the mother of Adonis" (Myrrha), Phaedra, and Tereus: τρίτα δὲ Ἀποστροφίαν, ἵνα ἐπιθυμίας τε ἀνόμου καὶ ἔργων ἀνοσίων ἀποστρέφῃ τὸ γένος τῶν ἀνθρώπων: πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ μὲν ἐν βαρβάροις ἠπίστατο ἡ Ἁρμονία, τὰ δὲ καὶ παρ᾽ Ἕλλησιν ἤδη τετολμημένα, ὁποῖα καὶ ὕστερον ἐπὶ τῇ Ἀδώνιδος μητρὶ καὶ ἐς Φαίδραν τε τὴν Μίνω καὶ ἐς τὸν Θρᾷκα Τηρέα ᾁδεται.
  2. ^ Pausanias (8.25.4–7) records that Demeter Erinys had a cult at Thelpusa, where she was regarded as the mother of the mythological horse Arion, having been forcibly impregnated by Poseidon in the form of a stallion, one of several versions of Arion's genealogy.[19]

References

  1. ^ Staples 1998, p. 104.
  2. ^ a b c d e Langlands 2006, p. 58.
  3. ^ DiLuzio 2019, p. 7, citing Valerius Maximus 8.15.12, virginum mulierque mens a libidine ad pudicitiam.
  4. ^ Kiefer 1934, p. 125.
  5. ^ a b Fantham 1998, p. 122.
  6. ^ a b Schultz 2006, p. 144.
  7. ^ Schultz 2006, pp. 143–144.
  8. ^ Richardson 1992, p. 411.
  9. ^ Schultz 2006, p. 200, n. 24, citing Pliny, Natural History 7.120 (34).
  10. ^ Langlands 2006, pp. 58–59.
  11. ^ a b Schultz 2006, p. 200, n. 24.
  12. ^ Orlin 2002, p. 97, citing Ovid, Fasti 4.157.
  13. ^ Richardson 1992, p. 12.
  14. ^ Orlin 2002, p. 102.
  15. ^ Richardson 1992, p. 158.
  16. ^ Staples 1998, p. 103.
  17. ^ Van Den Berg 2001, p. 205.
  18. ^ Fantham 1998, p. 121, on Ovid, Fasti 4.151–152.
  19. ^ Matthews 1996, pp. 142–149.
  20. ^ Fantham 1998, p. 122, on Ovid, Fasti 4.155–162.
  21. ^ Fantham 1998, p. 122, on Ovid, Fasti 4.160.
  22. ^ Nagle 1995, pp. 109, 204..

Sources

  • Barchiesi, Alessandro (1997). The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse. University of California Press.
  • DiLuzio, Meghan J. (2016). A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome. Princeton University Press.
  • Fanthan, Elaine (1998). Ovid: Fasti Book IV. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge University Press.
  • King, Richard Jackson (2006). Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid's Fasti. Ohio State University Press.
  • Langlands, Rebecca (2006). Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge University Press.
  • Matthews, V. J. (1996). Antimachus of Colophon: Text and Commentary. Brill.
  • Nagle, Betty Rose (1995). Ovid's Fasti: Roman Holidays. Indiana University Press.
  • Orlin, Eric M. (2002). Temples, Religion, and Politics in the Roman Republic. Brill.
  • Pasco-Pranger, Molly (2006). Founding the Year: Ovid's Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar. Brill.
  • Richardson Jr., Lawrence (1992). A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801843006.
  • Schultz, Celia E. (2006). Women's Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. University of North Carolina Press.
  • Staples, Ariadne (1998). From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion. Routledge.
  • Van Den Berg, R. M. (2001). Proclus' Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary. Philosophia Antiqua: A Series of Studies on Ancient Philosophy. Vol. 90. Brill.
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