Vertumnus

Bronze holds the heat in a Roman August. The figure standing at the corner of the Vicus Tuscus, a few paces off the Forum, would have been warm to the touch by mid-morning, and people touched it, because it was in the way. Traders shouldered past with baskets. Somebody had left cucumbers at its feet, and gourds, and cabbages tied with light rushes, and a garland of apples from a grafted tree that had finally condescended to fruit.

That is how Rome actually met Vertumnus. Not in a myth cycle, not in a hilltop temple, but as street furniture with a following, jostled by the crowd he was said to enjoy.

Varro, writing around 45 BC, is the earliest voice on him, and he explains the statue’s address rather than the god. The Caelian, he says, took its name from Caeles Vibenna, an Etruscan of distinction who came with his followers to help Romulus against King Tatius. After Caeles died his men were moved down off the high ground, since they held a position that was too strong and their loyalty was not entirely above suspicion. The street they were resettled on became the Vicus Tuscus, the Tuscan Way. And there, Varro notes, Vortumnus stands, because he is deus Etruriae princeps, the chief god of Etruria.

A Roman god with a foreign passport, planted in the middle of town. Propertius made a whole poem out of the awkwardness of it. In the second elegy of his fourth book the statue speaks for itself, opening with a shrug at its own strangeness and then getting straight to the point: I am a Tuscan born of Tuscans, and I do not regret abandoning the hearths of Volsinii in battle. This crowd of mine pleases me. I want no ivory temple. It is enough that I oversee the Forum.

The god then offers three explanations of his own name, which is two more than a god usually needs. The Tiber once ran across this ground, he says, and the sound of oars carried over the water, so he was named for the river’s turning. Or he is named because he receives the first fruits of the returning year. Or, best of all, because he can be turned into anything at all. Clothe him in Coan silk and he makes a passable girl; put him in a toga and nobody would deny he is a man. Give him a scythe and a twist of hay tied round his forehead and you would swear he had cut the grass himself. A turban makes him Bacchus, a lyre makes Apollo, nets make a hunter, a limed reed makes him the patron of fowlers. He drives a chariot. He vaults from horse to horse. He hawks goods with his tunic trailing in the dust, bends over a shepherd’s crook, hauls baskets of roses. And his greatest boast, he says, is the plainest one: the choice produce of the garden is put into his hands.

Underneath the costumes there is very little body. Propertius ends the poem with the statue’s own biography, and it is a materials list. It was a maple stock once, cut by a swift sickle, a humble god in a grateful city back before Numa. Then Mamurius cast it in bronze, the same Oscan craftsman remembered for making the shields of the Salii, and gave it a form loose enough to take every role asked of it. One work, many honours.

The origins behind that bronze are Etruscan and they are political. Livy records that the twelve peoples of Etruria met at the fanum Voltumnae, the sanctuary of Voltumna, between 434 and 389 BC, to hold games and to decide whether to go to war with Rome. He never says where it was, though it is generally placed in the territory of Volsinii, the city the Etruscans called Velzna. In 265 BC the slaves at Volsinii rose against their masters. Rome, bound by treaty, marched. The city surrendered the following year and the consul Marcus Fulvius Flaccus levelled it, resettling the surviving citizens elsewhere, and celebrated a triumph over the Volsinians in 264 BC. A temple of Vertumnus went up on the Aventine; its dedication day is recorded as the thirteenth of August in the fasti Antiates Maiores and in several later calendars, and Festus, condensing the Augustan grammarian Verrius Flaccus, notes that the temple held a painting of Flaccus in the purple toga of his triumph. Whether the god himself was formally summoned out of the doomed city by the ritual of evocatio is a modern suggestion rather than an attested fact, but the shape of the thing is clear enough. Etruria lost its meeting place and its presiding god in the same campaign, and Rome kept both.

What survives of the Etruscan side is thin and does not quite match. The name Veltune appears beside a figure on an engraved mirror, and scholars including Nancy Thomson de Grummond identify him with the god the Romans called Vertumnus, working back to a root reconstructed as velthumna, possibly from veltha, earth or field. No Etruscan text gives the Latin form of the name. The chief god of Etruria is known to us almost entirely through Romans describing him.

Then Ovid took him and made him a lover. In the fourteenth book of the Metamorphoses, Vertumnus wants Pomona, a hamadryad of Latium who carries a pruning knife instead of a javelin, grafts and waters her orchard, has walled herself in and wants nothing to do with men. Satyrs try. Pan tries. Silvanus and Priapus try. Vertumnus simply becomes whatever will get him through the gate: a rough reaper with a basket of barley, a haymaker with cut grass in his hair, a ploughman with an ox-goad still in his fist, a pruner, a man with a ladder who might be about to pick apples, a soldier, a fisherman with a rod. It works often enough that he gets to stand there and look at her.

Eventually he wraps his head in a coloured scarf, puts on a grey wig, leans on a staff and walks in as an old woman. He admires the fruit, tells her she is lovelier than any of it, and gives her a few kisses no real old woman would have given. Then he sits on the flattened grass and points at an elm across the garden with a vine running up it, and asks what either would be worth alone. The vine would be lying in the dirt. The elm would be wanted for nothing but leaves. He recommends a suitor: young, faithful, local, devoted to the same apples she is. To settle the matter he tells her about Anaxarete of Cyprus, who mocked a poor boy named Iphis until he hanged himself in her doorway, and who was turned to stone at her own window watching the funeral pass.

The speech fails. Ovid says so plainly: he had spoken to no effect. So the god throws off the dress and stands there as himself, bright the way the sun is when it finally beats the cloud. He was ready to force her. No force was needed, because the sight of him did what the story could not.

That is his whole surviving romance, and it is worth being straight about where it comes from. No cult text pairs the two. Pomona had her own priest, the flamen Pomonalis, ranked lowest of the flamines because fruit, in the reckoning that produced such lists, was the slightest crop in the field. The courtship is Ovid’s literature laid over two separate garden deities, not an inherited tale, and it has outlived almost everything else about him.

His powers follow from the name in every direction it can be read. He turns the season: the first grape darkening in the bunch, ears of grain swelling with milk, cherries and autumn plums, mulberries going red through the summer. He turns himself, without limit and without cost. His limits follow just as neatly. A god who is defined by change never acquires anything fixed. No source names his parents, gives him a birth, or gives him an end. He has no myth of his own beyond the one a poet lent him, and inside that one his gift is useless at the decisive moment, since the disguises buy him proximity and nothing else. He is best at the thing that is already turning. The rest he has to stand in the open for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Vertumnus in Roman mythology?

Vertumnus is the Roman god of change, the turning year and ripening garden produce. He came to Rome from Etruria, where Varro says he was the chief god, and his best-known cult site was a bronze statue on the Vicus Tuscus beside the Forum rather than a temple. He is also the shape-shifter of Roman religion, able to take on any form.

What does the name Vertumnus mean?

The Latin name most likely comes from the Etruscan Voltumna and was later pulled toward the Latin verb vertere, meaning to turn or change. Propertius has the god offer three competing explanations of it: the winding of the Tiber that once ran past his statue, the first fruits of the returning year, and his own ability to be turned into anything.

What is the story of Vertumnus and Pomona?

Vertumnus falls in love with Pomona, an orchard nymph who has walled herself in and refuses all suitors. He approaches her in a series of disguises, finally as an old woman who argues that a vine needs an elm and tells her the cautionary tale of Anaxarete, who was turned to stone for scorning a lover. The speech fails, so he drops the disguise and wins her by simply appearing as himself. The story is Ovid’s invention in the Metamorphoses, not an inherited Roman cult tradition.

Is Vertumnus the same god as the Etruscan Voltumna?

The Romans treated them as the same god, and Varro calls Vertumnus the chief god of Etruria. The Etruscan evidence is thinner: a figure labelled Veltune appears on an engraved mirror, and the shared root is reconstructed as velthumna, but no Etruscan text gives the name in its Latin form. Everything we know about the chief god of Etruria comes through Roman writers.

How was Vertumnus worshipped in Rome?

Worship centred on his bronze statue on the Vicus Tuscus, where people left garden produce and grafters hung apple garlands to pay their vows. He also had a temple on the Aventine, whose dedication day was the thirteenth of August, built after Marcus Fulvius Flaccus destroyed the Etruscan city of Volsinii in 264 BC.

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Janus, Saturn, Flora, Faunus, Anna Perenna, Quirinus, Vesta, Priapus, Pan, Hamadryad, Dryad, Tinia, Uni, Turan, Romulus