Faunus

Under the Aventine there was a grove so black with holm oak that people said a spirit lived in it, and at its heart a spring came out of the rock over green moss and never failed. Numa left bowls of strong wine beside the water and hid in a cave with his men. Two woodland powers came down at their usual hour to drink, found the wine, drank deep, and slept on the moss. The king walked out of the cold dark and locked their wrists into shackles. The horned one woke, strained at the iron, and found that the harder he pulled the tighter it held.

That was Faunus, and being caught did him no lasting harm, which is close to the whole of what a Roman needed to know about him. He is one of the oldest gods of Italy, older than the imported marble and the Greek genealogies, a power of the woods and the open fields and the flocks that graze between them. He has no elaborate cult story of his own. He has a sound. The Romans said the noises of the forest were his voice, that low compound of wind in the canopy, cracking branches, something moving through leaf litter just out of sight, and a man who spent his nights out with animals learned to listen to it.

What he looked like is a harder question than the statues suggest. Ovid gives him horns and has him shake them while he speaks, and beyond that early Rome seems not to have cared very much. The shaggy legs, the pointed ears, the wine-flushed grin of the faun in every museum courtyard came later, when Rome met the Greek Pan and decided the two were one god wearing different accents. The Italian original is vaguer and colder than his portraits. He is a presence in a wood, and presences are difficult to sculpt.

His family was assembled backwards, the way Roman divine families usually were. He is the son of Picus the woodpecker king and the grandson of Saturn, and by the nymph Marica he fathered Latinus, who ruled Latium when Aeneas came ashore. That makes him a king as well as a god, one of the civilizing early rulers of the peninsula, and it makes the entire Roman line, in the poets’ arithmetic, his descendants. His female counterpart Fauna shadows him through the sources as sister, wife or daughter, depending on who is telling it, and she has a secret cult of her own under the name Bona Dea. When he spoke oracles he was called Fatuus.

The oracle is the heart of him. Faunus did not answer questions in daylight and he did not answer them from a temple. In the sulphurous grove of Albunea near Tibur, and on the Aventine, the suppliant killed sheep, spread the fleeces on the ground, lay down on the greasy wool in the dark and waited to be told something in a dream. Varro said the answers came in Saturnian verse, the old rough native metre, which is a strange and rather touching detail: the god of the woods spoke in the rhythm Rome used before it learned Greek.

Latinus came to Albunea with a hundred sheep and a problem. The portents were bad, his daughter Lavinia had suitors, and the grove breathed its deadly vapour at him while he lay on the hides listening to the dark. The voice came out of the trees and told him not to marry the girl to any Latin. Strangers were coming to be his sons, and their blood would carry the family name to the stars. He obeyed, and the obedience started a war that fills the second half of the Aeneid. Faunus, characteristically, said his piece and went back to being weather.

The other face of the god is far less dignified, and Rome knew it and enjoyed it. On the fifteenth of February the Luperci ran the streets naked but for goatskins, striking bystanders and especially women with thongs cut from the sacrificed goat, a rite of fertility and purification that Livy attaches to Inuus, the name Faunus wears when he is making cattle conceive. Ovid explains the nakedness with a story. Faunus wanted Omphale, crept into the cave where she and Hercules were sleeping, felt in the dark for the soft dress and climbed into the wrong bed, because the two of them had swapped clothes for a joke. The hero threw him across the floor. Ever since, Ovid says, the god has hated clothing on his worshippers. That is a state festival explained by a bedroom farce, and the Romans told both in the same breath.

He got his temple late and by a fitting route. In 196 BC two plebeian aediles prosecuted cattle graziers, took the fines, and vowed a temple to Faunus with the money. It was dedicated two years later on the Ides of February, on the island where the Tiber splits around it, and Ovid pictures the altars of rustic Faunus smoking there. The countryside kept its own day for him on the Nones of December, when the year’s produce was stored and a kid died for him and the wine came out. Horace watched it happen: the wolf strolling among fearless lambs, the wood strewing its leaves for the labourer, the ditch-digger stamping three times on the earth he hates.

His powers are the powers of a landscape. He makes flocks and fields fruitful, he sends the future in dreams and in voices with nobody attached to them, and the sudden causeless dread that empties a wood belongs to him and to the crowd of lesser fauns who carry his name. Cicero records that fauns have often been heard in battle, then puts into the mouth of a sceptic the flattest line in the whole tradition: I have never heard the voice of Faunus. Not everyone was convinced.

The limits are the same landscape seen from the other side. This is a god who can be made drunk and tied up by a mortal king, and who admits under restraint that his jurisdiction stops at the treeline, since Jupiter keeps his own weapons and lends them to nobody. His prophecy has to be bought with blood and sleep, and it cannot be commanded. He speaks in wild places and nowhere else, so the more Rome paved, the further out he had to go. Even his shape was borrowed away from him in the end.

He lasted anyway. In a field in Norfolk, buried around the close of the fourth century AD, a hoard of gold and silver came up with thirty-three spoons in it, and most of them were inscribed to Faunus under by-names no Italian ever used: Faunus Ausecus, Faunus Medugenus, Celtic epithets grafted onto an Italian woodland god, with Bacchic ornament worked in around them. Someone at the far grey edge of the empire was still eating and drinking in his honour eight centuries after Latinus lay down on the fleeces, and then put the silver in the ground and never came back for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Faunus in Roman mythology?

Faunus is one of the oldest Roman gods, the deity of the forests, fields and flocks. He was also worshipped as a god of prophecy, delivering his answers in dreams and in voices heard among the trees, and the Romans regarded the sounds of the woods as his voice. Roman genealogy makes him the son of Picus, the grandson of Saturn, and the father of Latinus, king of Latium.

How did people receive prophecies from Faunus?

Suppliants slept in his sacred groves, at Albunea near Tibur and on the Aventine in Rome, after sacrificing sheep and lying down on the animals’ fleeces. The god answered in dreams and disembodied voices while they slept. Varro reported that the responses came in Saturnian verse, the old native Latin metre. In the Aeneid, King Latinus consults the oracle this way and is told to marry his daughter Lavinia to a foreigner rather than a Latin.

Is Faunus the same as the Greek god Pan?

Faunus and Pan were identified with each other by the Romans, but they are not the same in origin. Faunus is an old Italian god with no fixed appearance in the early record beyond his horns, while the goat legs, pointed ears and rustic pipes belong to the Greek Pan and were transferred onto Faunus and the fauns through that identification.

What festivals were held for Faunus?

Faunus was honoured at the Lupercalia on 15 February, when the Luperci ran nearly naked through Rome striking passers-by with goatskin thongs; Livy links that rite to Inuus, a name of Faunus connected with making cattle conceive. His temple on the Tiber Island was dedicated on the Ides of February in 194 BC. The countryside also kept a rural festival on the Nones of December, described by Horace, at which a kid was sacrificed and the village rested.

Why was Faunus captured and chained by King Numa?

In Ovid’s account, Numa wanted to learn the rite for averting Jupiter’s lightning, so he set out bowls of wine at a spring in a grove under the Aventine, waited for Faunus and Picus to drink themselves to sleep, and shackled them. The two gods told him that such knowledge belonged to Jupiter, not to rustic deities like themselves, but agreed to help him draw the sky god down to earth once they were released.

Related Entries

Faun, Sylvan, Saturn, Aeneas, Romulus, Priapus, Lares, Genius loci, Numen, Pan, Satyr, Silenus, Nymph, Dryad, Cernunnos