Numina · Book VI

Roman Mythology

Italy, and then the empire · c. 500 BCE – 4th c. CE

Rome’s own religion is not chiefly a body of stories. It is a body of practice — which rite, performed by whom, at what hour, in what words, on which of the year’s marked days. Getting it wrong invalidates it. The characteristic Roman text is not an epic but a calendar.

The stories that do survive are largely Greek, absorbed and re-labelled: Jupiter for Zeus, Juno for Hera, Venus for Aphrodite. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the great collection and is Greek in substance throughout. What is properly Roman is elsewhere — Janus, who has no Greek equivalent; Vesta and her hearth; the numina, the presences in a doorway, a boundary stone, a river.

The one indigenous mythology Rome made for itself was about Rome: Aeneas out of Troy, the she-wolf, Romulus and the furrow, the rape of the Sabines. It is national foundation myth, and Virgil wrote it to order.

VI.1Rite before storyA religion of the calendar: which words, which day, which hand.—
VI.2The numinaPresences in a door, a boundary, a river — the oldest layer, and the least narrative.—
VI.3Gods in Greek dressJupiter for Zeus: what was borrowed, and what refused to map.—
VI.4Aeneas and the foundingNational myth written to order, and very well.—
VI.5Gods of the stateVesta's fire, the augurs, and religion as public administration.—

The chapters are laid out; nothing is written into them yet. They stand so that what is missing is obvious rather than invisible.

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