Most people think of “classical mythology” as Greek. The stories of Achilles, Heracles, Oedipus and the Olympian gods seem to belong to a Greek tradition and are usually situated in Greece or Greek colonies. On this view the Romans were simply skillful imitators (or even thieves), who took so much from their enemies that they even shaped their own pantheon according to other peoples’ religion. After all even Aeneas, an essential hero in the narrative of Roman origins, was a Trojan refugee from Homer’s epic. So what did the Romans ever do for mythology? In this post I hope to show that Roman mythology is not simply made of legends about wilful warriors and stern old men. It’s much more queer than you might think!
Georg Wissowa, the most eminent scholar of Roman religion back in his day, starts his book Die Religion und Kultus der Römer (1912) by saying that the Romans were very assiduous in their religious observances but did not have any real mythology. Unlike the artistic Greeks, the Romans were a practical people, he says, too grounded in everyday life to entertain fanciful notions like the loves of Jupiter or the emotions of their gods. Poets like Ovid and Vergil were imaginative but rare examples of creative minds who elaborated on Greek myths to create new Roman epics precisely because the Romans lacked them. The Roman literary forms were all (aside from satire) taken from Greek literature.
Such is the traditional view. This is such bullocks (pardon my French) that one can hardly believe Wissowa was the great authority on Roman religion for the better part of the 20th century. While he rightly recognized that the calendar (Latin Fasti) was the most important document for the study of Roman religion, Wissowa was woefully inept in understanding Roman mythology. To presume that Roman religion was without a mythology is to imagine a series of empty gestures that did not in any way relate to anything beyond the material world. It is as though Romans were robots programmed to ritual actions with no thought as to why they carried them out.
However, there is another possibility: to assume that people worship gods, offer sacrifices, organize festivals and go to great expense to perform rituals on a daily basis without believing in a supernatural reality (bear in mind reality comes from the Latin verb reri= ‘to think, to imagine’) is to make these people hypocrites (at best) or simply idiots. One does wonder what these Germans were thinking and why. The most likely reason for their skepticism towards ancient beliefs was the sad reality of Protestant churches in their own time. Devoid of ritual celebrations and genuine belief they were largely idle traditions unworthy of attention, or so Wissowa and his colleagues experienced their pastors and contemporary Christianity. Theodor Mommsen (another giant of classical scholarship) was an agnostic and called Christianity "a worn out Jewish sect" (ausgelebte jüdische Sekte) and a "faith fit for codfish" (Köhlerglauben). You would not believe all the other outrageous and racist statement this man wrote…
To project modern attitudes (be they Christian, atheist or otherwise) onto ancient religions is a dangerous game and anachronistic one at that. To imagine that people celebrated the Saturnalia for days only because they needed a break or that they conducted rituals of the observation of birds (auspices) before every important decision just to fool the masses, or that they recited prayers and offered animal sacrifices simply because it was a tradition is to deny agency to the Roman religious mind, individual and collective. It is to ignore the essentials of life in the city of Rome and all her provinces.
But why am I decrying the traditional view, you may ask? Haven’t things changed a lot since these white old men died a century ago. Unfortunately not, or at least not as much as one might think. Classics is the most inveterate of all the humanities. It has proven resistant to change even as the rest of the world has moved on and universities have cut funding to more than a dozen departments recently in the USA alone. Of course, very few people would nowadays literally take the view of Wissowa or Mommsen but we still use essential works that they edited and most classicists blindly follow Mommsen’s readings of many key Latin texts.
Unlike the study of Greek mythology, which has made huge advances since the Second World War, Roman mythology is lagging behind its Greek sibling. Of course, many books and papers have been written but their impact is much smaller and restricted to a narrow circle of specialists. Roman mythology is still a controversial term. People widely disagree on what it means. When pressed to talk about Roman mythology most classicists resort to Virgil and Ovid, the famous stories from the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses. But these are literary works of individual authors from the period of Augustus, and surely Romans had myths before Virgil and Ovid were born. To which the standard answer is that most works of Republican literature have been lost: if only we had sources such as the antiquarian Varro we would be able to say so much more… but there is so much that we CAN say.
The issue is that Roman mythology is not of the same kind as Greek. Roman myths are largely legends about men and women who did something memorable and they are often cast in the form of an exemplary tale. The Romans remembered Cincinnatus because he saved the Republic in a time of crisis and resigned his post as dictator as soon as he defeated the enemy (he did not exploit his position). Conversely, the evil king Tarquin the Arrogant (better than ‘Proud’, as Mary Beard says) Spurius Maelius and Tarpeia all committed acts that deserved condemnation and are cast as negative exempla by Roman authors.
Tarquin was remembered as a tyrant who mercilessly exploited the people of Rome while Tarpeia betrayed the Roman soldiers for gold or because she had a lover among the enemies. Spurius Maelius simply wanted to make himself king, an abomination in the Roman Republic. But to reduce Roman mythology to the rhetorical exercise of positive and negative characters is a gross simplification. Myths are ambivalent and do not easily fit any single mould. Romulus himself, who was the founder and first king, murdered his own brother and many others in his struggle for power. In one version of his death it was the Senate that tore him to pieces rather than Jupiter’s lightning that took him to heaven.
Livy, the most important author on Roman history before the beginning of the empire, clearly knew this. Numerous times he relates tales preserved by tradition which are in his view incredible or a little too good to be true: how the Alban Lake had to be drained to capture the town of Veii or how Mars appeared to the Vestal Ilia to father Romulus and Remus.
Then there are the stories of the seven kings of Rome, most of which are legends with little historical import but great mythical value.
For example, the pious king Numa spent most of his life taking care of sacred rites alongside his wife, the divine nymph Egeria, who revealed to him many secrets of divine law. Numa instituted a series of festivals and rituals. He was so skilful in his dealings with the gods that he even managed to summon Jupiter himself down to talk to him and grant him the ancilia, the sacred shields that guaranteed Roman power.
The Roman calendar, which Wissowa prized so highly, is full of deities and incidents that form the core of Roman mythology. Parilia was the birthday of Rome, when Romulus himself founded the city but also the festival of Pales, the god or goddess (the gender varies) of shepherds and flocks. In August there is the festival of Volcanus, the violent god of the forge whose destructive force needs to be appeased in the heat of summer. Janus is the ambiguous god with two faces who released a torrent of hot waters to repel the enemies of Romulus in the prehistory of Rome. All of these are Roman myths and will be discussed in future posts.
Today I wish to focus on the god Vertumnus as an example of a queer divinity that people usually do not think as part of Roman religion. His statue stood in the busy street leading down from the Forum (city centre) to Circus Maximus, called Vicus Tuscus, Etruscan street. The name of the place carried the memory of foreigners (Etruscans were also Roman enemies for most of the Republican period) and was a shop district with merchants and traders and their customers jostling with people of more spicy professions.
Plautus says that people stand here to “sell themselves” and offer themselves to be “turned over.” Prostitution was legal and socially acceptable in ancient Rome and male prostitutes plied their trade on this street. It is likely that they prayed to Vertumnus while working under his watchful eye. Vertumnus’ name derives from the verb “to turn” (Latin vertere) and the poet Propertius explains that this is because the god turned back the river from this area, which was regularly flooded in the early period.
Vertumnus was also a god of change, seasons and plant growth. He married Pomona, the goddess of fruits and received offerings in the form of fruit and agricultural produce. But Vertumnus turns more than the seasons. He is a shapeshifter and can assume any form, as Propertius says in his poem 4.2. Vertumnus can take any shape and appears in various guises, from an elegiac puella (girl) to a Roman citizen (wearing a toga), soldier, fisherman, etc. Vertumnus’ fluidity eludes capture and definition and breaks the bounds of elegy, the genre of love poets.
There is no hard core to Vertumnus’ character, rather his essence lies in his fluidity and the ability to perform all sorts of different roles. By changing shape, Vertumnus exposes the game of Roman social identities which depend on performance and wearing proper clothes. Simply by donning the typical signs of masculinity (toga) or femininity (Coan silk), Vertumnus is able to assume normative gender roles, which are otherwise strictly defined and restrictive when it comes to Roman men and women.
From the perspective of queer ecology, Vertumnus is a queer divinity that uses his fluidity to expose the performative nature of Roman gender roles. Vertumnus’ ability to change his gender at will exposes the construction of Roman gender as artificial and performative (rather than natural and essentialist) and these are the very traits that define gender as a social construct, as Judith Butler famously argues.
Vertumnus shows that there is a queer aspect to Roman mythology, which is not simply reducible to the dichotomy of positive and negative examples or the litany of heroes and wilful warriors of ancient legend.
Ah, the great divide between those who can see or understand the numinous and the divine , and those who have been 'educated out of such things!' A ritual life is meaningful in its context always, but when ritual understanding is not perceived as existent or important to people's lives or society, then we cannot hold their views as having any integrity. We see a similar kind of thing when a person goes to see what I call 'an invulnerable healer.' How the healer has gained his or her skill means little when the healer cannot appreciate or address the needs of the patient with a condition that makes them sick. Heaven save us from mythologists who are ignorant or unable to perceive the numinous and the divine!