Venus

Rome’s first temple to Venus was paid for by adulterers. In 295 BC the aedile Quintus Fabius Gurges prosecuted a group of matrons for sexual misconduct, collected the fines, and used the money to build her a temple near the Circus Maximus. Livy records the transaction in a single dry clause. The epithet the building carried, Obsequens, means compliant or indulgent, which is either a very good joke or an admission about what the goddess was thought to do.

Two centuries later Rome went the other way. In 114 BC three Vestal Virgins of the highest families were condemned for unchastity with Roman knights, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. They ordered a temple to Venus, and the goddess took the name Verticordia, the turner of hearts, because her job was to turn women’s hearts from lust back to modesty. On the first of April the women of Rome, matrons and the ones who wore neither the headband nor the long dress of a matron, washed her statue, stripped the gold from it and put it back on, and made offerings behind a screen of myrtle.

Both temples make the same point. Roman Venus is not primarily about desire. She is about the effect desire has on the state, and the state legislated with her.

Start with the word, because it is not a name at all. Latin *venus* is an ordinary noun meaning charm, allure, the quality that makes something pleasing. It is an inherited abstract of an old type, related to *venustus*, elegant, and *venustas*, gracefulness, and to *venerari*, to approach a god with respect, and *venia*, indulgence granted. That family of words was not coined from the goddess. The goddess is the noun stood upright. There is no Venus in the Roman calendar before 295 BC, no priest of hers among the flamens, no place for her in the ancient invocation lists. She begins as a quality that Romans decided to worship.

Then she was crossed with something imported. In 217 BC, after Trasimene, the Sibylline Books directed that the man holding the greatest command should vow a temple to Venus of Eryx, the goddess of a mountain sanctuary in western Sicily whose cult ran back through Carthaginian Astarte. The dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus made the vow; the praetor Titus Otacilius simultaneously vowed one to Mens, the goddess of the mind, which tells you what the Senate thought Rome had recently been short of. Both went up on the Capitol two years later, divided, as Livy notes, by a single channel. A second temple of Venus Erycina followed in 181 BC outside the Colline Gate, vowed by a consul in a Ligurian war and dedicated by his son. That one belonged to the prostitutes. Ovid sends them there on the twenty-third of April to ask for beauty, popular favour and a persuasive tongue, with incense, mint, myrtle and roses tied up in rushes, and tells them plainly which gate to go to and that the goddess takes her name from a Sicilian hill.

The calendar around her needs care, because the poets and the antiquarians disagree. Varro says outright that the wine festival of the twenty-third of April belongs to Jupiter and not to Venus, and assigns the nineteenth of August instead, when a temple was dedicated to her, the gardens are said to be hers, and the market gardeners keep holiday. Ovid puts the prostitutes’ rite on the April date and then ends with Jupiter claiming the day. Both are probably right about different things: the day is legally Jupiter’s, and a Venus observance attached itself to it because the Colline Gate temple’s anniversary fell there.

What made her enormous was genealogy. Aeneas was her son, and Rome’s foundation story ran through him, so Venus was the ancestress of the Roman people before she was anybody’s private goddess. Lucretius opens his poem by calling her mother of the descendants of Aeneas. Then the generals took her personally. Sulla, after Chaeroneia, inscribed his trophies to Mars, Victory and Venus, and adopted the surname Felix, the lucky, styling himself in Greek as Venus’s own man. Pompey put a temple of Venus Victrix at the top of the seating of his new stone theatre in 55 BC, so that the tiers of seats could be described as the steps up to a shrine and nobody could accuse him of building Rome a permanent theatre.

Caesar went furthest. Speaking at his aunt Julia’s funeral he traced her mother’s line to the kings of Rome and her father’s to Venus, and concluded that his family therefore held both the sanctity of kings and the reverence owed to gods. He vowed a temple to Venus Genetrix, Venus the Ancestress, before Pharsalus, and dedicated it in the middle of his new Forum on the last day of his quadruple triumph in 46 BC, with a cult statue by the sculptor Arcesilaus and, out in front, a statue of his own horse. His heir finished the job. In the temple of Mars the Avenger the cult group set Venus beside Mars, and Ovid, walking past, notes that Venus stands joined to the Avenger with the man in front of the doors. Rome’s ancestress had become one household’s family portrait.

Her powers are exactly what the word means. She confers charm, which in Roman terms is a practical asset: it wins elections, closes deals, carries an argument and gets a general the benefit of the doubt. Attached to *felicitas*, luck, it becomes something a commander advertises. Attached to Aeneas it becomes a title to rule. Her weaknesses are the same ones the word carries. She has no independent Roman myth, no ancient priesthood, no archaic day of her own, and everything narrative about her is Greek, arriving with Aphrodite’s statues and Aphrodite’s stories. She can be given a moral direction by senatorial decree, from indulgent to heart-turning, which no god with a real biography could be. And by the time Hadrian built her the largest temple in the city, back to back with a personified Rome, she had become a very grand abstraction again, which is where she started.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Venus in Roman mythology?

Venus was the Roman goddess of charm, allure and persuasion, and the divine ancestress of the Roman people through her son Aeneas. Her name is an ordinary Latin noun meaning the quality that makes something pleasing, related to *venustus* and *venerari*. She had no cult at Rome before her first temple was built in 295 BC.

Is Venus the same as Aphrodite?

Venus is the most heavily Hellenised of the Roman goddesses, and her myths, her statues and her love affairs are Greek. What is distinctly Roman is her name as an abstract noun, the political history of her cults, and above all the dynastic claim: Caesar declared descent from her at his aunt’s funeral, and the Julian family built its legitimacy on it. Aphrodite was never anyone’s ancestress in that sense.

Why was Venus’s first Roman temple built from fines?

In 295 BC the aedile Quintus Fabius Gurges prosecuted matrons convicted of sexual misconduct and used the fine money to build a temple of Venus near the Circus Maximus, as Livy records. The cult title attached to it was Obsequens, the indulgent or compliant. It is the earliest attested Venus cult at Rome.

What was Venus Verticordia?

Venus Verticordia, the turner of hearts, was founded in 114 BC on the instruction of the Sibylline Books after three Vestal Virgins were condemned for unchastity. Her role was to turn women’s hearts away from lust and towards modesty, and her festival, the Veneralia, fell on 1 April. Roman women washed her statue and removed and replaced its gold ornaments on that day.

How did Julius Caesar use Venus?

Caesar claimed descent from Venus through Aeneas and his son Iulus, and said so publicly in the funeral speech for his aunt Julia, concluding that his family held both royal sanctity and divine reverence. He vowed a temple to Venus Genetrix, Venus the Ancestress, before the battle of Pharsalus and dedicated it in his new Forum in 46 BC. Augustus later placed Venus beside Mars the Avenger in the cult group of his own forum.

Related Entries

Aphrodite, Turan, Adonis, Anteros, Charites (Graces), Priapus, Aeneas, Romulus, Cybele, Vesta, Janus, Saturn, Quirinus, Mars, Juno