Pomona

The knife went in where the bark had been split, the graft was seated, and the whole operation took about as long as it takes to describe. Pomona did this all day, every day, in a walled orchard somewhere in the Latin countryside during the reign of a king whose name barely outlived him. The sound of her work was small and repetitive: the dry snap of a shoot coming away, the scrape of the blade, and then water, always water, running along the channels she opened around the roots until the ground went dark and cool.

She was named for what she tended. Pomum in Latin means orchard fruit, the kind that hangs on a tree and has to be waited for, and Pomona is that word turned into a person. The same divine name surfaces on the other side of the Apennines in Umbrian, which suggests she is older than the city that eventually claimed her, an Italic power over trees that Rome inherited rather than invented. Rome took her seriously in the way that costs money. She had her own priest, the flamen Pomonalis, one of the twelve lesser flamens whose list survives only because Ennius happened to record it and Varro happened to quote him. Several of those twelve serve gods so thoroughly forgotten that nobody can now say what they did. Pomona is not one of the forgotten ones, and the reason is a single poem.

Before the poem there is a grove. The Pomonal stood in the ager Solonius, off the road to Ostia at around the twelfth milestone, a stand of trees set aside for her in flat, working farmland within a morning’s walk of the sea. That is nearly everything the Roman record has: a priest, a grove, a name built out of the word for fruit. No temple in the city, no festival day marked in the surviving calendars, no myth. Which makes what happens next slightly absurd, because the only story anyone tells about her was written by one man, in Latin hexameters, roughly two thousand years ago, and it has carried her ever since.

Ovid puts her in the fourteenth book of the Metamorphoses and makes her a hamadryad, a tree nymph, though one with no interest in the forest or the streams. Her right hand never felt the weight of a javelin. She kept a falx instead, the curved pruning hook, and used it to crop back growth that had run too far, to cut away branches that straggled, to split bark and slide in a sucker so that one tree could feed a nursling that was not its own. She wanted no part of love, and because she was afraid of what a passing farmhand might do, she shut her orchard inside a wall and refused every male who came to the gate.

They came anyway. Satyrs, expert dancers to a man. Pans with pine in their hair. Silenus, looking younger than he had any right to. Even Priapus, the crude scarecrow god who guards gardens by threatening thieves with his pruning hook and rather more besides. None of them got in.

Vertumnus wanted her more than any of them and did no better, so he started changing shape, which was the one thing he was genuinely good at. He came as a reaper with barley in his arms and the dust of the field still on him. He came with hay wound round his temples, smelling of cut grass, as though he had just put down the fork. He came holding a whip with the look of a man who had unyoked his oxen a moment before, and as a pruner, and with a ladder on his shoulder like a picker, and as a soldier, and as a fisherman with the rod in his hand. Each disguise bought him a few minutes inside the wall and a look at her, and nothing more.

Then he went in as an old woman. Cap on his brow, stick in his hand, white hair at the temples. He admired the fruit, told her she was lovelier than any of it, and kissed her with rather more enthusiasm than an old woman usually manages. Sitting on the grass under branches bent with autumn weight, he pointed to an elm with a vine wound through it and made the argument: alone, the elm would be nothing but leaves, and the vine would be lying flat in the dirt. Then he named the suitor she ought to take, which was himself, and vouched for the man’s character at length. When that failed he told her a story from Cyprus about a young man named Iphis who loved a girl named Anaxarete, was mocked for it, and hanged himself from her doorpost with the garlands he had brought her still hanging there. She watched his funeral pass under her window out of curiosity, and the stone that had always been in her chest spread outward until it took her heart and her limbs, and the statue stood in Salamis afterwards in a temple to Venus the Watcher.

Pomona was unmoved. So Vertumnus dropped the disguise and stood there as himself, young and blazing, the way the sun looks when it burns through the last of the cloud. Ovid’s next line is the ugly one that most retellings quietly drop: he was ready to take her by force, and there turned out to be no need. She looked at him and wanted him back.

Her powers are the unglamorous ones, and they are real. She makes things take. Grafting is a small violence performed in the hope of abundance, and she is the goddess of it succeeding, of water reaching a root system, of blossom setting instead of dropping, of an orchard producing more than the sum of its trees. What she is not, and this matters, is a goddess of harvest. She has nothing to do with the picking. Her jurisdiction ends at the moment the fruit is ready.

Her limits are the same shape. She has no forest and no river; take her out of cultivated ground and she has no power at all. The wall she built kept out every satyr in Latium and did not keep out the one visitor who could look like anything he liked, which is roughly what walls are worth against a shapeshifter. And she has one weakness the others never mention, which is that she has almost no story. With no Greek counterpart to graft her onto, she stayed outside the great cycles, a genuinely ancient Italian goddess whose entire surviving mythology was written by a poet in exile.

The gap has been filled since, mostly by people who wanted it filled. The claim that Romans held a feast of Pomona on the first of November, and that Halloween’s apples and bobbing tubs descend from it, circulates widely and traces to modern popular writing on the festival rather than to any Roman calendar. No ancient source puts her there. She belongs to August and September and the smell of a warm orchard, to a knife, and to a wall that did not work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pomona in Roman mythology?

Pomona is the Roman goddess of fruit trees, orchards and gardens. Her name comes from the Latin pomum, meaning orchard fruit. Unlike most major Roman deities she has no Greek equivalent, and her cult appears to be genuinely old Italic rather than borrowed.

What is the story of Pomona and Vertumnus?

Vertumnus, a shapeshifting god, fell in love with Pomona, who had walled herself inside her orchard and refused all suitors. He approached her in a series of disguises as a reaper, a ploughman, a fisherman and others, then finally as an old woman who argued the case for marriage and told her a cautionary tale about a girl turned to stone for cruelty to a suitor. When that failed to move her, he revealed his true form and she accepted him. The story survives only in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 14.

What is Pomona’s symbol?

The pruning knife, a curved blade called a falx, is her defining attribute. Ovid says her right hand never held a javelin and always held the knife, which she used to cut back excess growth and to graft new shoots into split bark.

Was Pomona worshipped in ancient Rome?

Yes. She had her own state priest, the flamen Pomonalis, one of the twelve minor flamens, and a sacred grove called the Pomonal in the ager Solonius on the road to Ostia. That is a serious level of official recognition, which makes the near-total absence of myth about her all the more striking.

Is Halloween connected to a festival of Pomona?

No ancient Roman source records a festival of Pomona on the first of November or links her to the customs that became Halloween. The connection comes from modern popular writing on the festival’s origins and is not attested in the Roman calendar.

Related Entries

Priapus, Faunus, Flora, Ceres, Silenus, Satyr, Hamadryad, Dryad, Nymph, Venus, Nemesis, Vesta, Saturn, Demeter, Daphne