Camenae

Also Known As: singular Camena; older Latin Casmenae; also spelled Camoenae
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The Camenae are the goddesses of a sacred spring and grove outside the Porta Capena at Rome, whose water purified the shrine of Vesta and whose name Roman poets later used for the Muses.
Role in Mythos: They are the powers of the place where King Numa met the nymph Egeria by night and received the religious law of early Rome.
Relation to Humans: The Camenae supplied the water the Vestal Virgins carried each day to cleanse their temple, and Romans honoured them with water and milk and never with wine. Latin poets from Livius Andronicus to Horace called on a Camena where a Greek would have called on a Muse.

A woman in white comes down the road from the city gate with an empty jar on her shoulder. The morning traffic on the Appian Way moves aside for her. She turns off into a hollow under the Caelian hill, where the air cools and the light goes green, and kneels at a spring that runs out of a dark cave in the rock. She fills the jar. Then she carries it back up through the gate to the round temple in the Forum, where the water will be sprinkled to keep the house of Vesta clean. Tomorrow she or one of her sisters will make the same walk.

The spring belonged to the Camenae. They are among the oldest powers Rome owned up to, goddesses of running water whose grove lay just beyond the Porta Capena, in the valley the Romans named for Egeria. Nobody recorded their parents, their number or their separate names. They were simply there, with the water.

Their one great story is really a story about what happened beside them. Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, was a quiet Sabine who had been handed a city of soldiers and wanted to make it a city that feared the gods. Livy says there was a grove watered by a spring that never ran dry, flowing from a shaded cave, and that Numa went into it often and alone. He gave out that he met the goddess Egeria there, that she was his wife, and that the rites and priesthoods he was founding came from her advice. Livy leaves room for the thought that the king was a clever man with a useful tale. Rome kept the grove regardless. Numa made it sacred to the Camenae, because that was where they held council with Egeria.

Plutarch adds the night the shield fell. In the eighth year of Numa’s reign a sickness lay on the whole of Italy, and a bronze shield dropped out of the sky into the king’s hands. He told the people what he had learned about it from Egeria and her companions: that it had come to save the city, that eleven more must be made exactly like it so no thief could tell the true one, and that the place where it fell, with the meadows around, must be given to those goddesses. The spring that watered the spot he declared holy for the use of the Vestals. The sickness stopped.

For the Camenae themselves the old writers give no body at all. No statue type survives under their name, and no poet stops to tell the colour of their hair. What is recorded is a small bronze shrine that Numa was said to have set beside the spring. It was struck by lightning generations later, taken for safety into the temple of Honour and Virtue nearby, and finally carried off by the general Fulvius Nobilior to his new temple of Hercules of the Muses. The gifts they received were plain ones. Their offerings were poured in water and milk. Wine was kept away from them. Their day in the calendar was the thirteenth of August.

Then the poets found them. About the middle of the third century before our era a Greek freedman named Livius Andronicus put the Odyssey into Latin, in the rough native metre, and came at once to a problem. Homer begins by asking the Muse to tell him of the man. Rome had no Muse. Livius reached for the nearest thing his new city had, a goddess of a spring with a name that sounded like song, and asked a Camena instead. His successor Naevius kept the usage, and the epitaph that went under his name says that if gods could weep for mortals, the Camenae would weep for him.

The name helped. Varro, the most learned Roman of his century, explains that the older form was Casmenae, that the s wore into an r, and that the r then dropped out, and he ties the word to carmen, which means a song but also a spell, a prayer or a prophecy. The same root was heard in Carmenta, the prophetic goddess of birth who had her own altar by another of the city gates, and ancient writers set her and Egeria beside the Camenae as kindred powers. Spring water, childbirth and things chanted aloud all sat close together in the Roman mind.

Their reign over Latin poetry was short. Ennius, a generation or so after Livius, opened his epic by calling on the Muses under their Greek name, and the imported word won. The Camenae survived as an elegant alternative. Horace, writing the hymn for the great festival of Augustus, speaks of Apollo as welcome to the nine Camenae, and with that number the absorption was complete. The old water goddesses had been counted and fitted to the nine daughters of Mnemosyne.

The grove did less well. By the time of the satirist Juvenal, around the start of the second century, his friend Umbricius stops there on his way out of Rome for good and looks about him in disgust. The holy spring and its wood have been rented out to poor tenants. Every tree has to pay its way, and the Camenae, he says, have been turned out. The cave has been dressed up with imported marble, and he thinks the water would be nearer to its goddess with a border of green turf and the plain local stone. It is the complaint of a man who has just noticed that the sacred has a landlord.

What the Camenae could do follows from what they were. Their water made things ritually clean, which is why it went to Vesta’s hearth every day. Their company made a mortal wise, in the way Numa was said to have been made wise, with law and prophecy coming to him in the dark beside the cave. And through their name they gave Latin its first way to ask for a song. Their limits are as plain. They were tied to one spring in one valley, and they never acquired stories of their own to travel on. When a grander set of goddesses arrived from Greece with names, parents and a mountain, the Camenae had nothing to answer with except a place. Even that was let.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Camenae in Roman mythology?

The Camenae are Roman goddesses of a sacred spring and grove outside the Porta Capena, at the foot of the Caelian hill in Rome. King Numa was said to have dedicated the grove to them because he met the nymph Egeria there. Roman poets later used their name for the Muses.

Are the Camenae the same as the Muses?

The Camenae began as separate Roman water goddesses and were later identified with the Greek Muses. Livius Andronicus first used a Camena in place of Homer’s Muse when he translated the Odyssey into Latin. By the time of Horace, who writes of the nine Camenae, the two groups were treated as one.

Where was the spring of the Camenae?

The spring of the Camenae was just outside the Porta Capena in Rome, in the valley of Egeria below the southern end of the Caelian hill. Livy describes it as a spring that never ran dry, flowing from a shaded cave in a grove. The Vestal Virgins drew water from it each day to purify the temple of Vesta.

What does the name Camenae mean?

The Roman scholar Varro says the older form of Camenae was Casmenae and connects it with the Latin word carmen. Carmen means a song, and also a spell, prayer or prophecy. The same root was heard in the name of Carmenta, the prophetic goddess of birth.

How were the Camenae worshipped?

The Camenae received offerings of water and milk, and wine was not used in their rites. Their festival day was the thirteenth of August. Numa was said to have set a small bronze shrine beside their spring, which was later moved to the temple of Hercules of the Muses after lightning struck it.