Venus Verticordia

The "turning" or conversion of Venus Verticordia was not meant to suppress sexual desire but to encourage its positive expression in marriage, a purposing of its power for social benefit[6] in a display of personal excellence.

[30] The Temple of Venus Verticordia was one of several established by the Roman Republic in response to perceived outbreaks of female debauchery, in this instance incestum, the violation of religious chastity by three of the six women serving as "professionally chaste" Vestals.

[49] While the cult of Verticordia is sometimes viewed as bringing equilibrium to the influence of Venus,[50] countering her sexual force with the self-discipline of pudicitia, it may be a stretch to read the iconography of the coin as expressing that function.

[60] At a time of prodigies and moral panic, as well as the diminished presence of men in everyday life, Roman women throughout this century were called on to participate more visibly in state religion, and doing so required them to move in relative freedom about the city, either in carriages or on foot accompanied by numerous attendants.

[61] Aemilia, the wife of Scipio Africanus, arguably Rome's greatest general in the Second Punic War, was transported in an ornate carriage and employed implements of gold and silver in carrying out women's rites.

[d][77] Julius Obsequens (late 4th/early 5th century AD), who compiled a collection of prodigies and drew on now-lost parts of the Augustan-era historian Livy's work, dates the incident to the consulship of Manius Acilius Balbus and Gaius Porcius Cato in 114 BC.

While Plutarch has her out riding alone and her body later discovered, in Obsequens' account she is traveling in the company of her father from the Roman Games to Apulia when the incident occurs in the ager Stellas, the Stellate Plain.

But when the girl rode into the middle of the traveling party, she was struck dead by lightning, which caused her clothing to be pulled off without being torn – the bindings at her breast and feet were undone, and her necklaces and rings yanked off.

[80][81] Danielle Porte saw apotropaism in the powers of Venus Verticordia, as can be read into the prodigy's imagery of the protruding tongue characteristic of gorgoneia and female genitalia exposed as in the anasyrma skirt-lifting gesture.

[87] Reinach uniquely argued that Verticordia was herself une ravageuse ("ravager"), taking the verb verto to mean overturning or upsetting hearts, based on Latin usage at the time of the cult's initial founding.

[90] Among the duties of the public priesthood of the Vestals was religious maintenance: of the eternal flame of the virgin goddess Vesta; of a state storehouse of archives and artifacts such as the Palladium; and of their own chastity – all regarded as not merely symbols but actual guarantors of Roman security and power.

[95] The prodigy of the horse-riding virgin was linked to three Vestals – from three illustrious families, the gentes Marcia, Aemilia, and Licinia – committing repeated acts of sexual misconduct with several members of the equestrian order.

[14] The founding of Verticordia's temple and the punishment of the Vestals for sacrilegious inchastity were deemed insufficient to avert the panic, and these expiations were supplemented by a rare human sacrifice in ancient Rome — of two couples, one Greek and the other Celtic.

[13] On the Kalends, matrons and brides were to supplicate[129] Verticordia, seeking physical beauty, socially approved behaviors, and a good reputation,[k] while women of lesser standing (mulieres humiliores) celebrated Fortuna Virilis[130] by burning incense.

[145] "The nakedness that lies at the center of this celebration is no taboo," Alessandro Barchiesi observed of Ovid's reassembling of the religious materials, but "is a public gesture" emulating the ancestress of the Romans as Aeneadae,[m] descendants of Aeneas, son of Venus.

Ovid repeats in the Fasti a double entendre he had made in his Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") on how Mars "hooks up" with Venus on the Kalends of April, the day that joins his month of March to hers.

[170] The relation of the two goddesses is difficult to disentangle,[o] and Venus and Fortuna in their varying manifestations had overlapping functions in early Roman religion, owing in part to their association in the legends of Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome.

[184] Earlier in the Fasti, Ovid had used the word iuventus ("the youth" as a collective), which in this period often meant an elite troop of young men of the equestrian order, to refer to a band of satyrs subject to Venus.

[186] The male gaze played an essential role in the rites of Fortuna Virilis and Venus Verticordia, though they were celebrated only by women – a marked contrast to most all-female cults, which excluded or religiously prohibited the presence of men.

[191] By late antiquity, the drinking of cocetum and practices associated with Fortuna Virilis appear to have fallen into disuse,[192] but celebrations on the Kalends continued to serve the purpose of Verticordia in promoting conjugal life.

[194] A temple of Venus, possibly that of Verticordia,[195] was restored at Rome even in the latter 4th century, after Christian laws banning certain religious practices under the catchall label "paganism" were coming into effect.

[196] As an example of how mythological imagery could be adapted by Christians,[197] the bridal casket from the Esquiline Treasure, dating to around 380 AD, mirrors an image of Venus Anadyomene in depicting the bride, with a similar composition of the scene and the pose of the central figure.

[200] The Veneralia may have been the setting Augustine of Hippo had in mind in a sermon on Mary and Martha, dated to AD 393, when he writes that "we" should not get carnally distracted by "banquets of Venus" (epulae venerales)[q] but practice moderate behavior (modestia).

[203][204] The 6th-century antiquarian Ioannes Lydus, writing in Greek, says that women of higher rank had worshipped Aphrodite on 1 April "to achieve concord (homonoia) and a modest life",[205] with no mention of Fortuna Virilis.

[210] The coniunctio (connection, union, conjunction) of Venus integrates the range of women's experiences; Vesta is concerned with virginity in isolation, the rites and myths of Ceres have no place for prostitutes, and matrons have little to do with Flora, whose festival ends the month of April and continues into May.

[219] Venus Erycina was a Punic cult[220] imported from Sicily, and her temple was built as the result of a wartime vow, most likely in 212 BC at the close of the Siege of Syracuse which gave Rome control of the island.

In Verticordia's mythology, the threat of bestial sexuality is represented by the satyrs in Ovid's account of Venus's bath,[267] and by the prodigy of the horse-riding virgin, whose body is found with signs that ordinarily might be interpreted as rape.

[253] The German philologist Carl Koch suggested that the Sibylline consultation calling for a temple to Venus Verticordia might have directly prescribed the model of Apostrophia, as was the case with some other transferrals of Greek or other deities to Rome.

[268] For the Floralia, however, the bodies of entertainers and prostitutes were on display; on the Kalends, even respectable matrons removed the garments that marked them as such, the long dress (stola) that covered them to their feet and the headbands (vittae) that bound their hair.

Roman matrons were not portrayed with the loose, wet locks of Anadyomene,[282] which released an eroticism that might not be fully under control; elaborately bound-up hairstyles were not simply ornamental but "upright" in the moral sense.