Silvanus

Also Known As: from Latin *silva*, “wood”; invoked in the surveyors’ triad as Silvanus Domesticus, Silvanus Agrestis and Silvanus Orientalis, and as Silvanus Silvester; assimilated in Gaul to Sucellus, and attended by the female Silvanae
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds the line where cultivated ground stops and the wood begins, keeping herds sound and boundary stones honest on the near side of it.
Role in Mythos: He is the private god of Roman country life, worshipped without temple, festival or public priesthood by the people who actually worked the land.
Relation to Humans: Farmers, herdsmen, slaves and freedmen paid him directly, in food eaten on the spot and in more inscribed stone than almost any other Roman god received. He was also the thing a household barred from the door, since a rite recorded by Varro exists purely to keep him away from a woman who has just given birth.

The offering had to be made in daylight, out among the trees, and no woman could take part in it or watch it done. Cato set the quantities down as carefully as he set down a recipe for cheesecake: for each head of cattle, three pounds of meal, four and a half pounds of bacon, four and a half pounds of meat, three pints of wine. Food in one vessel, wine in another. A slave could perform it or a free man; it made no difference which. When it was over the whole of it was eaten there and then, on the spot, and the vow could be renewed every year if the farmer wanted his herd kept sound another twelve months. The god on the receiving end was Silvanus, and the transaction smells of woodsmoke and warm fat and wine drunk standing up under the branches.

His name is the wood itself. *Silva*, and a suffix that turns a thing into a person: the one who belongs to the forest, the one who runs it. Romans who lived off the land did not think of forest as scenery. Forest was what grew back. Clear it, plough it, wall it, and it sits at the treeline waiting for the season you fall ill or run short of hands. Silvanus stood precisely on that line. Horace names him *pater Silvane, tutor finium*, father Silvanus, guardian of the boundaries, and sets him beside Priapus among the powers a smallholder thanks for grafted pears and darkening grapes.

The Roman land surveyors, who had a professional interest in where things stopped, went further and gave every holding three of him. One Silvanus domesticus for the farmstead and its enclosure. One Silvanus agrestis for the rough pasture past the last furrow. One Silvanus orientalis standing on the boundary itself. Hyginus Gromaticus credited him with setting up the first stones ever used to mark the limits of a field, which quietly makes him patron of the most quarrelsome object in Roman rural life.

He had no festival day.

There is no Silvanalia in any Roman calendar, no state temple, no public priesthood, no seat in the official cult of the city. And yet roughly eleven hundred inscriptions to him survive. Among the traditional gods of Rome only Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Hercules, Fortuna and Mercury drew more dedications, and Silvanus comfortably outdrew Isis and Mithras. That arithmetic is the most interesting fact about him: a god the state never organised, and that the empire’s poorest people would not stop paying for. The names on the stones bear it out. Slaves and freedmen carved most of them, imperial slaves especially, men who owned almost nothing and still found the money for lettered marble. They formed burial and dining clubs in his name, kept groves for him, and appointed their own priests where the state had provided none.

He is easy to recognise in stone once you know the kit. A bearded man, usually well past his prime, with a curved pruning hook, the *falx*, in one hand and a branch or wreath of pine or cypress in the other, and a dog sitting at his feet. One version of the image was common enough to earn its own label, *dendrophorus*, tree-bearer, for the reliefs where he shoulders a young tree whole. The most famous surviving example is not really Silvanus at all: a marble relief of Antinous, Hadrian’s drowned favourite, dressed in the god’s attributes, a pine wreath in his hair, a sickle lifted in his right hand, a hound cut in low relief beside his ankle.

Virgil gave him a real address. In the eighth book of the *Aeneid* there is a vast cold grove beside the Caeritan river, ringed by curving hills and walled in black fir, where the old Pelasgians were said to have sacrificed to Silvanus, god of ploughland and herds, and to have handed over to him both the grove and a day of the year. That is the grove where Aeneas is brought his shield. The god is a piece of the landscape’s memory there, older than the people telling the story.

The other scene attached to him is stranger and much less friendly. Varro recorded a rite performed at a house where a woman had just given birth, and Augustine repeated it four centuries later with visible relish. Three men walked round the building in the night. The first struck the threshold with an axe. The second struck it with a pestle. The third swept it with a broom. Each act carried its own small deity, Intercidona for the cutting, Pilumnus for the pounding, Deverra for the sweeping, and the entire performance had a single purpose: to stop Silvanus coming in at the mother. Axe, pestle and broom are felling, milling and housekeeping. Three unmistakable signals that this ground is worked, occupied, swept. It is a lovely piece of religious reasoning. You do not fight the wood. You show it a clean floor.

Set that beside Cato’s rule barring women from the cattle offering and the god takes a definite shape. He was dealt with by men, out of doors, at a measured distance from the house, and the house had ways of telling him to stay outside.

What he almost entirely lacks is narrative. Around the turn of the fifth century the commentator Servius, explaining why Virgil ties Silvanus to the cypress, produced a short and brutal tale: the god loved a boy called Cyparissus who kept a tame deer, killed the animal by accident, and watched the boy grieve himself into the tree that bears his name, a branch of which Silvanus has carried ever since by way of consolation. It is a good story and it is not his. Ovid had already told it about Apollo, and Servius did little more than swap the god’s name and the deer’s sex. Peter Dorcey, who assembled the epigraphic record, says as much without ceremony. Silvanus never had a myth cycle. He had customers.

Out in the provinces he changed clothes. In Gaul the pruning hook often gives way to a great hammer or mallet and a wide-mouthed pot, and the god shades into the native Sucellus, though altars there still carry pine cones and, more rarely, a sickle. In Dalmatia and Pannonia something odder happened: he is shown with goat legs and pipes, standing among nymphs, an image found essentially nowhere else in the empire, and on the Dalmatian reliefs usually in company with Diana. The likeliest explanation is that the Adriatic Silvanus was an indigenous god who acquired a Greek face through *interpretatio graeca* and a Roman name through *interpretatio romana*, so the label on those stones may be Italian while the power underneath is local. Pannonia keeps the nymphs and drops Diana altogether.

His powers are modest and exact, which is presumably why so many people trusted them. He keeps a herd from sickening. He holds a boundary where a boundary has been properly marked. He makes the rough ground at the edge of a farm safe enough to graze and cut in. None of it requires a temple, a calendar, a magistrate or a citizen, and that accessibility is the whole of his appeal: a slave with three pints of wine could approach him on equal terms with anyone.

The limits run along the same seam. He is a god of the outside, and everything that belongs indoors excludes him. He can be shut out by an axe, a pestle and a broom. He has no claim on the city, no cult officers to defend him, no state machinery of any kind, and when the empire turned Christian that lack told: the private, provincial, unglamorous cult of Silvanus was suppressed without much difficulty, having nothing official to defend. What is left of him is not a story but eleven hundred stones, most of them cut by people who could not have told you a single thing he had ever done.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Silvanus in Roman mythology?

Silvanus is the Roman god of woodland, herds and field boundaries, whose name comes from the Latin *silva*, meaning wood. He was a god of private rather than state religion, worshipped mainly by farmers, herdsmen, slaves and freedmen. Horace calls him “father Silvanus, guardian of the boundaries.”

Did Silvanus have a temple or a festival?

No. Silvanus had no state temple, no festival day in the Roman calendar and no public priesthood, which sets him apart from the official gods of Rome. Despite that, roughly eleven hundred inscriptions to him survive, more than for Isis or Mithras, and among traditional Roman gods only Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Hercules, Fortuna and Mercury received more dedications.

What are Silvanus’s symbols?

Silvanus is shown as a bearded, elderly man carrying a curved pruning knife called a *falx* and a branch or wreath of pine or cypress, usually with a dog at his feet. Reliefs in which he shoulders a whole young tree gave rise to the title *dendrophorus*, tree-bearer. In Gaul the pruning hook is often replaced by a hammer or mallet and a wide-mouthed pot.

Why were women excluded from the worship of Silvanus?

Cato’s instructions for the cattle offering state directly that a woman may not take part in it or see it performed. A related rite recorded by Varro was designed to keep Silvanus away from women entirely: after a birth, three men struck the threshold with an axe, then a pestle, then swept it with a broom, invoking Intercidona, Pilumnus and Deverra to bar the god from the house. The three tools stand for felling, milling and housekeeping, the signs of cultivated life that the wild god cannot cross.

Is the story of Silvanus and Cyparissus genuine Roman myth?

Not originally. The tale of Silvanus accidentally killing a boy’s tame deer and the boy becoming the cypress tree comes from Servius, a commentator writing around 400 CE, who transferred it from Ovid’s version about Apollo and changed the god’s name and the deer’s sex. Silvanus has almost no narrative mythology of his own; his record is overwhelmingly one of dedications and ritual rather than stories.