Juno

The path went down through a dark cleft in the rock outside Lanuvium, and the girls who went down it were blindfolded, carrying barley cakes in their hands. A snake lived in the cave. If it ate what they brought, the girl was chaste and the year would be fertile, and the farmers waiting above said so out loud. If it left the cakes, ants carried the crumbs away and everyone knew. Propertius describes the baskets shaking in the girls’ hands. Aelian, who tells the same story about a Latin town his manuscript calls Lavinium, treats the snake as a competent judge of character. A moneyer of Lanuvian descent put the scene on a Roman silver coin in 59 BC, with the goddess’s head on the other side, which is how we know the rite was live public religion and not a curiosity dug up by antiquarians.

The goddess on that coin wears a goat. Cicero, writing a few years earlier, has a speaker say that you never see the Lanuvian Juno, even in dreams, except with the goatskin, the spear, the little shield and the shoes with turned-up toes, and then adds the line that governs everything on this page: the Argive Juno does not look like that, and neither does the Roman one. An educated Roman of the first century BC could state plainly that his own city’s Juno, the Latin town’s Juno and the Greek Hera were three different-looking beings. The identification everyone now takes for granted was a thing he could see the seams on.

What holds them together is not a personality but a function. Juno owns the Kalends. On the first of every month, when the new moon was sighted, the junior pontiff called the people together on the Capitol and announced how many days remained until the Nones by crying out *Kalo Iuno Covella*, five times or seven depending on the month, and the *regina sacrorum*, wife of the priest who inherited the king’s religious duties, killed a sow or a ewe-lamb to Juno in the Regia. That is one of very few state sacrifices in Rome performed by a woman, and it happened twelve times a year for as long as the Republic lasted. Beyond that, the Romans held that every woman had a *iuno* of her own, exactly as every man had a *genius*. Seneca puts it in four words: they gave each person both a Genius and a Juno. A poem in the Tibullan collection has a girl offering incense to her Birthday Juno on her own birthday. The evidence for the idea is Augustan and later, so how old it is remains open, but the shape of it is unmistakably Roman. The great goddess of the Capitol and the animating force inside a married woman were the same word.

Her titles are really separate cults, each with a temple and a date. Juno Lucina had a grove on the Cispius older than the temple that stood in it, and her dedication day, the first of March, was the Matronalia. Ovid has Mars himself explain that the festival commemorates the Sabine women who stopped a war by walking into the space between the drawn swords, and only afterwards turns to the childbirth business: a woman in labour should loosen her hair when she prays, so that the goddess will loosen her womb as gently. Bring her flowers, he says, she likes things in bloom. Servius Tullius was said to have required a gift to be deposited in her treasury for every child born, which makes her temple the city’s birth register.

Juno Moneta sat on the citadel, on ground cleared by pulling down the house of the man who had saved the Capitol from the Gauls and was later thrown off it. The dictator Lucius Furius Camillus vowed her temple in 345 BC during a sudden war with the Aurunci and it went up the following year. The name comes from *monere*, to warn: Cicero records that after an earthquake a voice came out of her temple ordering an expiation with a pregnant sow. Rome later put its mint in the building, which is why the coins of half the world are still called money. A denarius of 46 BC shows her head on one side and the anvil, tongs and hammer on the other.

On the seventh of July the women of Latium sacrificed to Juno Caprotina under a wild fig and used a branch of the tree in the rite. The story attached to it is not a myth about the goddess at all. After the Gallic sack, the Latins demanded free-born Roman girls as hostages; a slave woman called Tutula, or Philotis in some tellings, proposed sending maidservants dressed as brides instead; that night they stole the enemy’s weapons and she climbed a tall fig tree, spread her cloak behind her as a screen and held out a torch towards Rome. Roman women and their maids spent the day of that festival running about the fields joking with any man they met and eating under fig branches.

The most consequential thing Rome ever did to Juno happened in 396 BC. Camillus, about to storm Veii, prayed to the queen of the gods who then dwelt in Veii and asked her to follow the victors to a city that would soon be hers as well. When the town fell, chosen young men washed themselves, put on white and went into her temple, and one of them asked the statue: do you want to go to Rome, Juno? Livy says the rest shouted that she had nodded. A later version had her speak, which Livy declines to endorse, though he does report that the image came away almost weightless. She was carried to the Aventine and Camillus dedicated her temple there four years later, and the matrons made a great occasion of it. Whether that was really the ritual called *evocatio*, the formal calling-out of an enemy city’s protecting deity, is doubted by modern scholars, since the men who addressed her were soldiers rather than priests and they did it after the sack rather than before it. The one *evocatio* formula that survives whole was recorded for Carthage, and it comes with a note that the Romans deliberately concealed the name of their own city’s protecting god so nobody could use the ritual on them.

The Greek Juno arrived through one identifiable channel, the Sibylline Books and the ten men who read them, and the dates are known. In 217 BC, after Trasimene, six couches were spread in public for twelve gods in six pairs, and Juno was placed on the first of them beside Jupiter, as his consort, in the Greek manner. Before that afternoon the Roman Juno is not defined by being anybody’s wife. The same crisis produced Sibylline orders to sacrifice to Juno Regina on the Aventine and Juno Sospita at Lanuvium, so the Greek machinery was reinforcing Italic cults, not replacing them. Ten years later a hermaphrodite child was born at Frusino, the books were consulted again, and twenty-seven maidens walked through Rome singing a hymn to Juno Regina composed by Livius Andronicus, a Tarentine Greek. That is the first Latin hymn the Roman state ever commissioned, and Livy, reading it two centuries later, called it rough and unpolished. The literary Juno came last of all: it is Virgil who makes her the implacable enemy of the Trojans, and he does it by making her love Carthage best, which is a poet’s way of writing the Punic Wars into heaven.

Her powers are civic and bodily at once. She can be induced to change sides, which no Greek god ever does. She opens the womb and marks the month. She protects a people as a corporate body, which is what the goatskin and the spear are for. Her limits are the limits of a goddess defined by her communities: outside the Kalends, the matrons and the towns that own her, she has almost no independent will in the Roman record, and the jealous, scheming figure most readers expect belongs to Greek epic and to Virgil. Even her famous bird is late. On Republican coinage her creatures are the goat she wears, the geese that woke the Capitol, and the snake in the cave at Lanuvium. The peacock arrives with the emperors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Juno in Roman mythology?

Juno was the Roman goddess of the Kalends, of childbirth and of the community as a body of citizens, and one of the three deities of the Capitoline Triad. She was worshipped under many separate cult titles, each with its own temple and festival, including Regina, Lucina, Moneta, Sospita and Caprotina. Romans also held that every woman possessed a private *iuno*, the female counterpart of a man’s *genius*.

Is Juno the same as Hera?

They were formally identified, but Cicero could still write that the Juno of Lanuvium looked nothing like the Juno of Rome or the Hera of Argos. The Roman material centres on the monthly Kalends sacrifice, the matrons, the goatskin-clad war goddess of Lanuvium and the transfer of Juno Regina from Veii. The Greek consort role was fixed in 217 BC, when the Sibylline Books seated her beside Jupiter at a public banquet of the gods.

What was Juno Moneta and how did she give us the word money?

Juno Moneta was Juno the Warner, whose temple on the Roman citadel was vowed in 345 BC by the dictator Lucius Furius Camillus. Cicero records that a voice from her shrine once warned the city to expiate an earthquake with a pregnant sow, which is the ancient explanation of the title, from *monere*, to warn. Rome later housed its mint in the building, so the goddess’s epithet became the name for coinage.

What happened when Rome captured Veii in 396 BC?

Camillus prayed to Juno Regina, the protecting goddess of Veii, asking her to follow the Roman victors to a new home. After the city fell, chosen young men in white asked her statue whether she wished to go to Rome, and Livy reports that they shouted she had nodded. Her image was carried to the Aventine, where Camillus dedicated her temple in 392 BC.

What was the snake rite at Lanuvium?

At Lanuvium, girls were sent down into a cave in Juno Sospita’s sanctuary carrying barley cakes for a sacred serpent. If the snake ate, the girl was judged chaste and the coming year fertile; if it refused, her lack of chastity was taken as proven. Propertius and Aelian both describe the rite, and a Roman denarius of 59 BC shows a girl feeding the serpent.

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Hera, Uni, Tinia, Zeus, Vesta, Janus, Saturn, Quirinus, Romulus, Aeneas, Capitoline Wolf, Cybele, Io, Jupiter, Minerva, Venus