Venus in Rome: from goddess of gardens to mother of Caesar's line

When the Romans encountered the Greek Aphrodite, they already had a deity called Venus, but of far more modest outline. Within a few centuries that Italic figure became one of the pillars of public religion, guarantor of military victory and mythical mother of the Roman people. Her story clearly shows how Rome could turn cult into a political instrument without emptying it of its religious meaning.

Italic origins

Roman scholars linked Venus to gardens and to the fertility of cultivated nature. Marcus Terentius Varro, in his treatise on agriculture, invokes her as protector of gardens, and the festivals called Vinalia, linked to the new wine, were associated with Jupiter but also with Venus, as Ovid recalls in the Fasti. Linguists connect the goddess's name to a root expressing desire and grace, the same from which Latin words such as venustas, beauty, and venia, favour, derive.

The first Roman temple of which we have certain knowledge was that of Venus Obsequens, that is, the propitious, vowed in 295 BC by Quintus Fabius Gurges during the Samnite wars. According to Livy, the building was paid for with the fines of matrons convicted of adultery, a detail that reveals how the goddess was already associated with the moral sphere of marriage and its duties.

Venus Erycina and the war with Hannibal

A decisive turning point came during the Second Punic War. After the disaster at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, the Sibylline Books were consulted, and they directed that a temple be vowed to Venus Erycina, the goddess worshipped on Mount Eryx in western Sicily. The Sicilian sanctuary, frequented by Elymians, Phoenicians and Greeks, was famous throughout the Mediterranean, and the goddess who dwelt there shared features with the Phoenician Astarte.

The temple was dedicated on the Capitol in 215 BC by Quintus Fabius Maximus. By welcoming a goddess tied to a place that legend connected with Aeneas, the city also strengthened its own Trojan origins. In 181 BC a second temple of Venus Erycina rose outside the Colline Gate; according to Ovid, on her feast day it was visited in particular by women who practised prostitution, a sign of a character closer to love and desire.

The mother of the Aeneadae

The link with Aeneas, son of Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises, became a political argument in the first century BC. The gens Julia claimed descent from Iulus, son of Aeneas, and therefore from the goddess herself. Julius Caesar vowed a temple to Venus before the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, and in 46 BC he dedicated the temple of Venus Genetrix at the centre of his new forum, next to the Roman Forum.

A few years earlier Lucretius had opened his poem De rerum natura with an invocation to the goddess, called Aeneadum genetrix, mother of the Aeneadae. The Epicurean poet, who denied that the gods intervene in human affairs, made Venus the symbol of the vital force that drives every living being to reproduce. Virgil, in the Aeneid, would then turn the mother of Aeneas into an attentive and caring protector of Rome's destiny.

The temple of Venus and Rome

The last great consecration came with the emperor Hadrian, who had the temple of Venus and Rome built on the Velia, facing the Colosseum. It was the largest temple in the city and was dedicated around AD 135. The sanctuary had two opposed cellae, in which the two goddesses sat back to back. Modern scholars have often pointed out that Roma read backwards forms the word Amor, but it cannot be proved that the wordplay was intentional.

From goddess of gardens to guarantor of the empire, Venus passed through the whole religious history of Rome. Her trajectory explains why her name still evokes beauty, love and a certain idea of civic greatness at the same time: three dimensions the Romans did not feel as contradictory, but as different aspects of the same divine power that brings to birth, unites and preserves.