Diana

The priest walked the grove with a drawn sword and did not stop looking over his shoulder. He had reached the office by killing the man who held it, he was a runaway slave, and he would hold it until somebody faster arrived. Strabo, writing under Augustus, found the arrangement barbaric and reached for Scythia to explain it. Pausanias, a century and a half later, was told the same thing by the locals and passed it on. Ovid gave it two lines. Suetonius mentions it once, to say that Caligula, irritated that the current holder had lasted so long, hired a stronger man to go and deal with him. That is the entire ancient record of the king of the wood: five short notices, none of them a religious document, spread over a hundred and fifty years.

The famous version is not in any of them. The golden bough, the mistletoe, the priest as a dying and reviving god locked in a sacred marriage with the earth, all of it comes from Frazer, who opened *The Golden Bough* at Nemi in 1890 and built twelve volumes of comparative anthropology on the back of it. The single ancient sentence about breaking a branch is in Servius, a schoolmaster commenting on Virgil four hundred years after Strabo, and Servius is explaining a poem, not describing a rite. Anthropology stopped believing Frazer a long time ago. The lake is still there and so are the votives, and what they show is stranger and better than the theory.

Her name is not borrowed. *Diana* is built on the root for the bright daylit sky, the feminine of the same word that produced Jupiter and Dius Fidius, and Varro knew an older form, Diviana. Cicero, hunting for etymologies, said she was called Diana because she made a sort of daytime in the night. Varro lists her among the gods Titus Tatius the Sabine vowed altars to when the Sabines and Romans merged, which is a Roman way of saying she was here before the city was. Catullus, writing the earliest Latin hymn to her that survives, gives her the mountains, the green groves, the hidden glades and the loud streams, calls her Juno Lucina in the pains of childbirth, calls her Trivia and calls her the Moon with counterfeit light, credits her with filling the farmer’s roof with crops, and ends by asking her to keep the Roman people safe as she has always done. Not one line of that requires Artemis.

Nemi is a flooded crater in the Alban hills, still and dark, close enough to Rome that a determined woman could walk it in a day. The Romans called it *speculum Dianae*, Diana’s mirror. Virgil calls it the lake of Trivia. Horses were not allowed in the grove, and the reason given was Hippolytus, torn apart by his own team and hidden there by the goddess under the name Virbius. The spring in the grove belonged to the nymph Egeria, who advised Numa. Ovid describes the fence hung with woollen threads and studded with tablets recording answered prayers, and women coming out from the city with burning torches and garlands in their hair. Statius, ninety years later, says the smoke fills the valley in August, the lake glitters with the reflection of the torches, the goddess garlands her old hunting dogs and cleans her arrows, and for that day the wild animals go safe.

The politics matter as much as the atmosphere. Cato quoted the dedication inscription, and Priscian copied it out: the grove of Diana in the Arician wood was dedicated by Egerius Baebius of Tusculum, Latin dictator, on behalf of eight peoples. Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia and the Rutulians of Ardea. Rome is not on the list. This was the Latins’ own federal sanctuary, and the shape of the fragment suggests it predates the treaty that tied the Latin cities to Rome in 493 BC.

So Rome built its own. Servius Tullius, Livy says, persuaded the Latin chiefs to join in raising a temple of Diana at Rome on the Aventine, on the model of the great common sanctuary at Ephesos, and their agreement amounted to admitting who was in charge. Dionysius adds the detail that makes it credible: a bronze pillar in the temple engraved with the terms of the league and the names of the member cities, which he says was still standing and still legible in his own day, in archaic letters. Around it grew a story about a prodigious heifer, an oracle that whoever sacrificed it to Diana would win the empire, a Sabine who brought the animal to the Aventine, and a Roman priest who told him he really ought to wash in the Tiber first and killed the beast while he was gone. The horns stayed nailed up in the porch for centuries.

The Aventine temple was dedicated on the thirteenth of August, and that day became the slaves’ holiday. Verrius Flaccus explained it by saying that Servius Tullius had been born to a captive maidservant, so the slave-born king’s temple gave the slaves a day off. Plutarch, describing the same holiday, adds that Roman women made a particular business of washing their hair that day, and never mentions Diana at all. Her Aventine altar had a further afterlife nobody planned: its founding charter became a template. An altar set up at Salona in Dalmatia in AD 137 simply declares that the remaining laws for this altar shall be the same as those laid down for the altar of Diana on the Aventine, and the same formula turns up at Narbo and Ariminum. The paperwork travelled better than the cult.

She was a healer, which the theory about sacred kings tends to leave out. The Nemi deposits are full of terracotta and bronze body parts, feet, eyes, hands, wombs, internal organs, and votive surgical instruments alongside them. People went there sick and left a model of what hurt. She had other Italian seats: Mount Algidus, the hill above Tusculum, and Mount Tifata over Capua, where Sulla, having beaten Norbanus on its slopes in 83 BC, made over to her the whole surrounding territory and the healing springs, and recorded it on a bronze tablet inside the temple and an inscription on the door.

The Greek Diana can be dated too. In 217 BC the Sibylline Books put her on a public couch beside Apollo, as his sister, one pair among six. Catullus by the 50s BC is calling her Latonia and putting her birth on Delos. A denarius of 43 BC carries the earliest surviving Italian image of her three-formed, three figures joined behind the neck in front of a stand of cypress, which is the Arician cult statue. Virgil canonised Virbius and Egeria in 19 BC; Horace paired her with Augustan Apollo at the Secular Games in 17 BC; and by the 90s AD Statius could call the thirteenth of August the Ides of Hecate without explaining himself. Even Strabo’s Scythian priest turns out to be part of that layer rather than a survival from before it: the Tauric colouring is a Greek literary idea, out of Euripides, applied to Nemi somewhere around 100 BC by people trying to account for a custom they found embarrassing.

What she does follows from where she is. She controls the ground beyond cultivation and the moment of crossing into it, which is why she holds the crossroads and the moon and the doorway of birth. She protects what is hunted, and on her own festival she calls the hunt off. Her power runs to the people the Roman state ranked lowest, slaves, foreigners, fugitives, women in labour, and her sanctuaries sit outside walls and boundaries where those people could reach them. Her limits are the same limits. She has no place inside the pomerium worth speaking of and no seat in the machinery of government. She never gives an oracle. She holds the office at Nemi and cannot protect the man who holds it for her, which the emperor demonstrated by hiring an assassin as a joke. And the last chapter is a good deal grimmer than a bough: Caligula moored two enormous pleasure ships on her lake, they sank, Mussolini drained the water to get them out in 1929, and both burned in a fire in May 1944.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Diana in Roman mythology?

Diana was the Roman goddess of wild country, the crossroads, the moon and childbirth. Her name comes from an Italic root meaning bright sky, the same root behind Jupiter, and she was worshipped in Latium before Rome adopted Greek myth. Her two great sanctuaries were the grove at Lake Nemi, a common cult of the Latin cities, and the Aventine temple at Rome.

What was the rex Nemorensis, the king of the wood?

The rex Nemorensis was the priest of Diana at Lake Nemi, an office held only by a runaway slave who took it by killing the previous holder in single combat and kept it until he was killed in turn. Strabo, Pausanias, Ovid and Suetonius all mention it, and Suetonius records that Caligula hired a stronger challenger to unseat a long-serving priest. Servius, writing four centuries after Strabo, is the only ancient source who adds the detail of breaking a branch first.

Is the golden bough story true?

The golden bough as most people know it comes from James Frazer’s *The Golden Bough*, published from 1890, not from Roman religion. Frazer identified the bough as mistletoe and read the priest of Nemi as a dying and reviving sacred king, an interpretation later anthropologists including Joseph Fontenrose rejected. The ancient evidence is five brief notices about a slave priest with a sword, plus one late grammarian’s remark about a branch.

What is the difference between Diana and Artemis?

Diana is a Latin goddess with a Latin name and her own cult history, including the Latin League sanctuary at Nemi, the Aventine charter, the slaves’ holiday on 13 August and a substantial healing practice. Artemis is Greek. The two were formally paired in 217 BC when the Sibylline Books seated Diana beside Apollo at a public banquet of the gods, and Latin poets completed the identification over the following two centuries.

Why was Diana associated with slaves?

Her chief priest at Nemi was required to be a runaway slave, and the dedication day of her Aventine temple, 13 August, was kept as a holiday by slaves throughout Rome. Ancient writers explained this by the tradition that Servius Tullius, who founded the temple, was himself born to a captive slave woman. Her sanctuaries stood outside the city’s sacred boundary, where non-citizens and fugitives could reach them.

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