DIANA

I. Name

The name Diana is derived from the Latin name for the Roman goddess and is formed using the same Italic stem that can be seen in the names dius and dies. These are Latin terms that mean 'the bright sky' and 'daylight', which have at their base the Proto-Indo-European root *dyew-, "shining", also the source of the word deus and of the Roman god Jupiter. As such, Diana is the shining one, the female aspect of the bright sky. In addition, Michiel de Vaan considers Diana to be a native creation in the above named family rather than an importation.¹

It is curious that Diana was connected to the Moon while epitomizing the day itself. To explain that, the Stoic speaker from Cicero derives Diana from dies ("day") because she turns nighttime into daytime; he also gives her the additional title of Omnivaga (wide-roaming) to describe how the moon goes through its monthly cycle. Varro wrote down an older version of this name as Diviana and states that Diana was associated with the moon which creates a "kind of" day during the night. Possibly her Roman name reflected her tie to her twin, Apollo, or represents the night's 'termination' of day.^2,3

There are very few references to this form of the name from antiquity. There is no ancient stone inscription which can be dated to this period. In his Origines, Cato had transcribed the dedication of the sacred grove of Aricia (the lucum Dianium in nemore Aricino) made by Egerius Baebius of Tusculum as dictator Latinus on behalf of some eight other Latin peoples. With that archaic formula from the sixth century BCE, it contained an adjective for the goddess Diana named Dianius.⁴

The earliest bronze examples of this type of cutting were found in Diana’s temple at Nemi; they are votive bronzes inscribed in an archaic dative form as “Dianai”, and include the plaque donated by Publilia Turpilia for her son Gnaeus. This plaque has an inscription written to emulate ancient forms of dedicatory language. Alongside these is another example of this tradition of inscription which survives through Macrobius’ account of the views of Nigidius Figulus, that Apollo was Janus and Diana was Iana, both having their names reduced to a single bright root, the same as the god of doors.^5,6,7

Sources: de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin (2008); Varro, De lingua Latina 5.68; Cato, Origines fr. 58 Peter; the Nemi dedications in Remains of Old Latin IV.^1,2,4,5

II. Roman History

The Aventine Foundation

Diana entered Roman public religion as an instrument of statecraft. According to Livy, when the Romans used public religious practice as a means of foreign policy, Diana was part of that. He states that when Servius Tullius attempted to persuade the Latins to build a temple of Diana on the Aventine Hill with Rome as its base (as did the Greeks), this was to show that Rome had finally established itself superior to all other contending powers.

In the same book, he tells the story of the 'Sabine heifer' which is described as being "wonderfully" large. The people from the city who were responsible for sacrificing it would be granted power by the gods. When the Sabines took the heifer to the altar of Diana located at the top of the Aventine hill, the high priest of Rome asked them to bathe in the Tiber before they could sacrifice the animal. However, the high priest then proceeded to make the sacrifices. For many years, the horns of the heifer were kept in the temple as proof that Rome had outsmarted its opponents.⁸

Dionysius of Halicarnassus provided the subsequent evidence to back up these claims. According to him, all the cities paid their portion from public coffers, the festivals and meetings of the confederation were held at this new temple, and the covenant for the founding of the League, which was inscribed upon a bronze pillar listing the names of all the member-cities, had remained intact until his time.⁹

The Remarks of the Antiquarians

Although the tradition remained alive through the goddess long after the kings, it continued to be applied. The earlier name and lunar interpretation were maintained by Varro while Nigidius (as reported by Macrobius) made a theological link with Janus as Iana. In addition, Macrobius elsewhere also transmitted the physiologic theory, derived from Greek banquet question material, which stated the moisture and heat of the moon would mature bodily development and ease childbirth, and thus was the theoretical basis for the invocations of Diana by women in childbirth.^2,7,10

Diana Throughout Latium

The Aventine Temple came after her presence was already adjacent to Roman contexts. In his list for the Arician grove, Cato lists a number of towns (Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and Ardea) as being involved communiter in a map of the old city-state of Latium. Horace did speak of the goddess of the hill on the Aventine and the wooded mountain of the Aequian border in his Hymn to the Secular games, thus putting her hill and hers alone, against the others. Festus records another way that some remember this. Manius Egerius is said to have consecrated the grove to Diana and Strabo wrote about the sanctuary at Aricia as he found it, filled with people, money and odd priests. Before Rome began to organize all of these, the cult sites for Diana were spread around the Alban Hills. Thus when Rome built a temple to Diana, it was more like an addition to what appareetly already existed.^4,11,12,13

III. Epithets

Sources: Cicero, De natura deorum 2.68–69; Horace, Odes 3.22 and Carmen Saeculare; Catullus 34; the dedications collected in CIL, including the Tifatina inscriptions.^3,11,14,15

IV. Temples

Aricia (Nemi)

Lake Nemi is eleven miles from Rome via the Via Appia to the south, The history of the temple itself is shrouded in an ancient Latin mystery as it belonged to the city state of Aricia; ultimately, it became the famous sanctuary to Diana by far, rivalling the fame of her other holy sites in Greece and Anatolia. Excavations have already shown that the site was active in the most archaic periods of history. Livy references in his Annals that a dedication in the Arician woods was made by the dictator Latinus.

At the end of the Latin revolt in 338BCE, Aricia was absorbed into the Roman state along with sixteen other Latin cities. The Aricians in the decades after founded an opulent new temple with a new gilded golden roof and other facets unacceptable to their Roman conquerors, so the temple has been viewed as asserting a Latin identity. The area around the temple developed into a highly complex commercial district welcoming endless pilgrims, as the invectives against Augustus' ancestors from the area attest.

Thanks to pivotal excavations such as the one of 1885, archeologists such as Mette Moltesen have examined groups of statues tied to both Diana and Apollo at the site, often rendering complex examples of Greek myth. One headless seated statue may have represented her regal aspect. Statuettes of Diana in Greek-style as the huntress Artemis are the most popular early items.^16,17

The emperor Augustus renovated the site. Other emperors appeared to use it as a place of purification. During the first centuries CE, the context of the site being used as a place of healing and incubatio becomes obvious with references to many doctors working there, particularly ones directed toward healing 'deformity'. The grammarian Festus seemingly alludes to the contradiction of Nemi in a proverb "Multi Mani Ariciae", because one aspect of this proverb praised the Manii gens (led by Manius) for dedicating at such an illustrious site, but others like Sinnius Capito interpreted the phrase with 'Mani' (Manius was a common name, mani meaning ugly mask) to describe the plebeian crowd needing healing there. ^18,19

Capua

Mount Tifata in Capua formed another important focus of the worship of Diana Tifatina, a very notable nexus of her worship in the province of Campania. It owned extensive lands, receiving endless funding and contributions from Roman military campaigns. This form of Diana received empire-wide worship by the military because of the victories over Hannibal at Capua in 212BCE and Sulla's victory over Norbanus in 83BCE, leading to the latter establishing it as a territorial zone with rights.^20,21,22,23

Inscriptions from Tifata show the importance of Diana as huntress, while a famous mosaic of a sacred choir was also recovered from the site. Pausanias while digressing from his description of Olympia claims he also saw the temple in Italy and claimed to have witnessed the skull of a giant elephant there.^23,24

The Aventine Temple

The temple of Servius Tullius on the Aventine remained the chief house of Diana at Rome for the whole life of the city. Its founding charter had a legal afterlife of its own, for the regulations of the altar, the lex arae Dianae in Aventino, became the standard formula of Roman sacred law; the charter of the altar of the imperial cult at Narbo in Gaul closes by ordering that its rules be the same as those of the altar of Diana on the Aventine. Under Augustus the temple was rebuilt by Lucius Cornificius, one of the works Suetonius lists among the monuments the princeps encouraged other leading men to raise, and it carried the name Diana Cornificiana thereafter.^8,9,15,25

Circus Flaminius

A second temple stood in the southern Campus Martius. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus vowed temples to Juno Regina and to Diana in his Ligurian campaign, and Livy records his dedication of both in 179 BCE near the Circus Flaminius, with games marking the occasion.²⁶

The Shrines

Dedications for a Diana Planciana were made to a member of the gens Plancia. The dedication for this Diana Planciana can be found on the Quirinal. Although the site is believed to be located near there, the location has been identified with less exactness than other sites. This dedication is recorded in the topographic records as being among the smallest of the many shrines dedicated to the goddess Diana within Rome.²⁷

Plutarch also reported that there were two unusual rituals associated with worship of Diana in Rome. All temples of Diana were adorned with deer antlers (except for those at the Aventine) in honor of an ancient Sabine cow, and there existed a single temple of Diana that men did not enter, which was said to be located in the Vicus Patricius.^27,28

V. Diana and Apollo

The Romans paired the twins together strongly. Catullus' poem called Diana the greater daughter of Latona (Leto), born by the Delian olive tree, mistress of the mountains and of the green woods. The origin of Leto's children were among Rome's very early Greek borrowings. The combination also became a matter of ritual for both poetry and actuality. During Rome's earliest supplication (the banquet of the gods), Apollo and Latona were seated on one couch and Hercules and Diana on another.^14,29

Between his mother and his sister, the temple of Apollo, located on the Palatine Hill, featured Apollo between his mother and sister Diana in this sanctuary where the emperor Augustus commemorated Actium. At the Secular Games of 17 BCE they had an entire hymn as Horace's chorus of young boys and girls sang to Apollo and Diana as a group, to the goddess of the Aventine and Algidus hills, who attended the prayers of the Fifteen and the saeculum was dedicated to the twins.^11,30

VI. Dianas of the Frontiers

On the northern frontiers the name Diana did the same work the name Mercury did for the male gods of Gaul: it gave a Latin face to native powers of forest and height. In the Ardennes the goddess Arduinna, the numen of the wooded heights whose one secure altar reads deae Ardbinnae, was worshipped under the Roman name; when her cult meets us last, in Gregory of Tours's account of the stylite Vulfilaicus pulling down the great statue on the hill near the Ardennes, the goddess the country people served is called simply Diana.^15,31

In the Black Forest the equation is epigraphically explicit. Tacitus knew Abnoba as the mountain from whose slope the Danube rises, and the altars of the region, at Badenweiler among the healing springs and at Mühlenbach on the road, invoke Diana Abnoba by the double name, the Roman huntress and the forest goddess fused in a single dative.^15,32 Miranda Green reads these frontier Dianas as the standard grammar of interpretatio in the west, the local mistress of beasts and wild country addressed through the imperial vocabulary, and the soldiers and officers of the frontier provinces left Diana more dedications than almost any goddess of the wild.³³

VII. Diana as Goddess of the Roman Countryside

The wilderness lay on one side of the city and the countryside was the other. Just as her Greek counterpart, the Roman Diana was held to control the countryside and urbs from either end. Horace's ode to his Sabine farm operated as a delineation of a mini-cult: she protects mountains and groves and listens to girls in labor, and he dedicates to her the pine tree leaning over his villa; he will sacrifice the blood of a young boar to her once a year. In eight lines the wild huntress and protector of the household land are one goddess.

The hunting poets began their work under her patronage. As an example, Grattius starts his Cynegeticon off with Diana (the giver of the arts of the hunt) before naming a single dog. The large rural sanctuary at Aricia demonstrates what the countryside expected from her. Healing was one of the foremost aspects. The shrine on the lake became a vacation spot for those who were sick or hoped to be cured. Pilgrims filled the terraced areas of the shrine and its deposits contained many votive offerings from the citizens of the surrounding countryside. C. M. C. Green in her study indicates how the healing aspect of Diana's cult was tied to nature.^6,11,34

VIII. The Plebeian Emphasis

The Aventine was located beyond the pomerium, which defined the city, and it was the home of the plebeians, who were a people of merchants, foreigners and the poor. The Temple of Diana served both as an archive for the plebeians and a place of refuge. Dionysius states that the law which secured the Aventine to the plebeians was written in bronze and placed in the temple of Diana, so the charter of the hill remained housed within her dwelling.^6,9,27

The relationship between masters and slaves was so well-known as to become a common reference point. The Ides of August (the birthday) of the Temple of Diana at Aventine Hill is the day when both male and female slaves would celebrate their "holiday" or time off from work. The ancient writer Plutarch in Roman Questions rhetorically asked why this day was celebrated by both male and female slaves.^13,25,28,35

IX. Household Worship

The cult of the family was most evident in what families contributed. Household documents, the Nemi bronzes, include a statue dedicated by Publilia Turpilia to Diana for her son, as well as a bronze left to the goddess by the nurse, Paperia. They are the offerings of a mother and a nurse of the nursery, rather than those of public officials.^5,6,11

In addition to carrying the household cult into the field during the course of the year (at least annually), women also took it outside the home. According to Propertius, Cynthia runs with lit torches to take light to Trivia's grove, and there she discharges a private vow through the use of torchlight as she makes her way down the road to Nemi. Plutarch further notes that the domestic aspect of the festival included washing the hair of the women on the day of the goddess's Ides. This festival had become so routine for these women that they washed their hair as part of the rituals involved with it.^28,30

X. Diana-Selene; Roman Interpretations Cosmologically

The Roman cursory philosophical interpretation of Diana through reading is lunar and has three parts as briiefly stated, Varro and Cicero derived the origin of Diana from the root of light (day) and placed her in the sky as the moon that creates day out of night; thus, they described her as the wide roamer of the month.^2,3,10

In his hymn, Catullus describes her by the titles Trivia and Luna at once and Horace prayed to the Diva Triformis. Other poets established the canon for the triple form. Servius did so when he identified Diana as the Virgin with Three Faces as being Hecate in Virgil's three folded state. Therefore Diana was Luna in Heaven, Diana on Earth, and Proserpina in Hades. Macrobius completed this description physically in regard to the physical aspect of the Moon's moist Influence over the growth of bodies and time of birth.^11,14,36

The Roman inheritance of Diana from her Latin origins appears to have placed more emphasis on her identity as a lunar deity. Some scholars have observed that the Greek form of Artemis becomes more closely identified with Selene, the moon goddess, after most of the Hellenistic world was annexed to Rome. On the other hand, the relationship of Artemis to both Selene and the Titaness named Phoebe is established in Greek myth earlier than this.

XI. Festivals of Diana

Sources: Plutarch, Roman Questions 100; Statius, Silvae 3.1; Martial 12.67; Ovid, Fasti 3.263–272.^28,37,38,39

XII. The Inversion; Medieval Diana as Witch and Demon

The first time Diana appeared after the cessation of worship in the metropole of Roman cities was when Gregory of Tours in the sixth century said the peasants of the Ardennes continued to worship Arduinna (Diana) until missionaries destroyed the statue.

The Canon Episcopi, which included Diana as part of a key document of medieval beliefs regarding witchcraft. Around 906 AD, Bishop Regino of Prüm wrote and distributed his Canon Episcopi in a guide book for Bishops, which condemned certain wicked women, who had been deceived by demonic deceptions, believed they rode out during the dead of night on beasts with Diana, goddess of paganism, along with countless numbers of women, traveling vast distances, while answering to Diana as their mistress.

The Canon itself says that the ride is a deceptive fantasy, but it fixed Diana as the Mistress of the so-called Night-Flight for the remainder of the Middle Ages. The inclusion of the Canon Episcopi into Gratians Decretum in the Twelfth Century added the authority of canon law to this image. It is a strange curiosity that Artemis appeared to weather five centuries of libel to attract new worshippers.^31,40

Burchard of Worms took up this text in his Penitential, and added Herodias to Diana as the lady of the ride. Confessors were instructed to ask questions about these beliefs for over three hundred years. Enough vitality remained in this tradition so that it reached the courts. At the end of the Fourteenth Century in Milan, two women, Sibillia and Pierina, were prosecuted for belonging to a group known as the Society of Diana or a gathering of the Lady referred to as Oriente. This was one of the last times the Company of Diana would appear before disappearing altogether. It is a point identified by Carlo Ginzburg as the intersection between the old beliefs regarding the Company of Diana and the new stereotype of the Witches Sabbath. By the time the Great Persecution occurred, Diana had turned from the goddess of the Aventine to become a demon of night. The demonologists referenced the Canon Episcopi.^41,42

XIII. Diana in Renaissance and Baroque Art

In the Renaissance, the cultured denizens of Italy recovered the divine huntress as a positive symbol, evolving from display in cassone from the 1390s onwards to a positive portrayal with Correggio's work Diana (1517).^43,44

The painters took her from ancient poetry, the bow, the quiver, the dogs, the little tunic and most of all the crescent moon she wore as a diadem to indicate that she was Diana, an indicator common to the entire tradition. In the mid-16th-century French court, she became a political language around Diane de Poitiers, the school of Fontainebleau created the slender naked huntress of the Louvre and a complete artistic expression of Diana at the Château d'Anet for the queen's mistress and the goddess who lent each other their names^45,46

Diana was always a source of material for the Baroque painters. They adapted stories from Ovid into the major themes of female nudity and divine anger following on from the moralistic cassone. Titian’s “poesie” (paintings) for King Philip II of Spain became the model for the rest of Europe when he created Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. In those two works Titian showed the fatal consequences of the bathing. Domenichino later added many figures to the Borghese Gallery’s painting of Diana on a hunt with an archery competition among the nymphs. Rembrandt then brought together Actaeon and Callisto in one forest pool. Rubens went back to Callisto’s shame. And finally, Vermeer started his career by creating Diana and Her Companions but unlike all of the others he depicted the goddess in a way that emphasized her quiet, calm, and peaceful state.^45,46

XIV. Diana as Goddess of Women in Roman Times

For Roman women Diana was above all the goddess who brought children into the light. Catullus's hymn addresses her as Juno Lucina to women in labor; Cicero explains the invocation by the moon's government of the months of gestation; and the Carmen Saeculare prays to her under the names Lucina and Genitalis to bring births to term and raise up the generations of Rome. The philosophical tradition Macrobius transmits gave the same belief its physics, the moist lunar warmth that opens the womb.^3,10,11,14

Deposits from Nemi clearly contained many offerings made by women, including terracotta representations of mothers and children and anatomical images relating to childbirth. They also include objects donated for safe birth, healthy development of offspring, and for successful pregnancy. In addition to these artifacts the inscriptions preserved at the sanctuary record that a mother named Publilia Turpilia made an offering on behalf of her son, and a nurse named Paperia made an offering while she was still in the nursery. These torches represent part of this devotion. Ovid writes about the women who went to the sanctuary, crowned, bearing burning brands and it seems their vows were fulfilled. Cynthia ran the same route under her light.^5,6,28,30,39