Neptune (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Neptune, the Roman god of freshwater and the sea, had a festival timed not to stormy weather or crashing waves but to the worst heat of summer, when rivers ran low and springs nearly dried up. Every year on the 23rd of July, Romans gathered in branch shelters between the Tiber and the Via Salaria to drink spring water and wine, sheltering from the sun while their water supplies dwindled. That date sits between two other festivals also connected to water and drought, suggesting that Neptune's deepest roots had nothing to do with the ocean at all.

  Who was Neptune before Rome looked outward to the sea? How did a god of inland springs and wells come to carry a trident and rule the waves? And what does a carved carnelian scarab from Vulci, a bronze mirror in the Vatican Museums, and an obscure Etruscan linen book tell us about the reach of his cult? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Before the Ocean

  ›

  Servius, the late-antique grammarian, explicitly names Neptune as the god of rivers, springs, and waters. That description predates the sea entirely. Scholars have speculated that Neptune absorbed the theology of an earlier Proto-Indo-European freshwater deity, because the ancient Indo-Europeans lived inland and had little direct contact with the sea. A Roman god built on that older foundation would naturally govern springs and wells before governing the ocean.

  The Irish god Nechtan, master of rivers and wells, offers a striking parallel. Georges Dumézil proposed that the name Neptunus shares its root with the Indian and Iranian theonyms Apam Napat and Apam Napa, as well as the Old Irish Nechtan. All carry the meaning "descendant of the waters". Dumézil traced this to the Indo-European root nepots, meaning "descendant" or "sister's son".

  Paul Kretschmer proposed instead that the name derived from the Indo-European word for "moist substance". Raymond Bloch refined this into an adjectival form built on "he who is moist". Meanwhile, the 19th-century scholars Ludwig Preller, Karl Otfried Müller and Wilhelm Deeke argued for a geographical explanation: the Etruscan deity Nethuns, they believed, took his name from the toponym Nepe or Nepete, the town now known as Nepi, near Falerii. That district had been associated with Neptune's cult since antiquity, and Nepi and Falerii were both famous for the quality of their meadow springwater. The town name itself may derive from a pre-Indo-European word for "damp wide valley" related to the proto-Greek word for "wooded vale or chasm".

  Hubert Petersmann, in lectures delivered during the 1990s, pushed the etymology further still. He proposed the Indo-European root nebh, meaning "damp" or "wet", which gives Sanskrit nabhah, Hittite nepis, Latin nebula, German Nebel, and the Slavic nebo. On that reading, Neptune would be an ancient sky deity of clouds and rain, the fertilising counterpart to Jupiter's clear skies. Catullus 31.3 even uses the phrase "uterque Neptunus" ("both Neptunes"), hinting at his dual nature as ruler of both surface and sky water.

• 3. Neptunalia and the Drought Calendar

  ›

  July 23rd placed the Neptunalia in a precise sequence of three summer festivals. The Lucaria, which fell earlier in the same week, was devoted to clearing overgrown bushes and burning excess vegetation. Neptunalia followed, focused on conservation and the draining of surface waters. Then came the Furrinalia on July 25th, sacred to Furrina, the goddess of springs and wells. Taken together, the three formed what scholars read as a logical progression through the problems of summer drought.

  The celebration itself had an informal character unusual in the Roman calendar. Romans built shelters from tree branches in a woods between the Tiber and the Via Salaria. Men and women mixed there without the usual constraints of Roman society. Spring water and wine were both drunk to escape the heat. Neptune received the sacrifice of a bull during the festival, which placed him in rare company: only Apollo, Mars, and Jupiter were also considered appropriate recipients of a bull sacrifice, though Vulcan has been depicted receiving a red bull and a red-bull calf as well.

  The agricultural layer of the festival is visible in the bull offering itself, since bull sacrifice implies a connection between the deity and worldly fertility. If an incorrect offering was mistakenly presented, additional propitiation was required to avoid divine retribution. That strict protocol reflected the gravity of Neptune's domain over water at the season when water mattered most.

• 4. One Temple, Many Consorts

  ›

  Neptune had only one temple in Rome. It stood near the Circus Flaminius, the Roman racetrack in the southern Campus Martius, and dated back to at least 206 BC. Around 40 BC, the consul Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus restored it, an event commemorated on a coin of the period. Inside was a sculpture of a marine group by Scopas Minor. The Basilica Neptuni, later built on the same area of the Campus Martius and dedicated by Agrippa in honor of the naval victory at Actium, eventually overshadowed the older temple, which had itself replaced an even more ancient altar.

  By the first century BC, Neptune had also displaced Portunus as the god of naval victories. Sextus Pompeius, the son of Pompey the Great, went so far as to call himself the "son of Neptune". For a period, Neptune shared dominion over the sea with Salacia, the goddess of saltwater, who was also considered his wife.

  Salacia and her companion Venilia were Neptune's paredrae, entities representing the fundamental aspects of a god's power. Varro connected Salacia to salum, the sea, and Venilia to ventus, the wind. Festus attributed to Salacia the motion of the sea; she caused the retreat of waves back into the deep. Venilia brought waves to shore. The Christian philosopher Augustine, in De Civitate Dei, devoted an entire chapter to ridiculing the inconsistency: since Salacia personified the deep sea, he asked, how could she also govern the retreating waves, which are a surface phenomenon? Augustine also wrote that Venilia represented "the hope that comes", understood as an aspect of Jupiter conceived as the world-soul.

  Servius, commenting on the Aeneid at V 724, described Salacia as a figure the ancients named the goddess of prostitutes. He also wrote elsewhere that Salacia and Venilia were in fact the same entity. Modern scholars have split along interpretive lines. Dumézil and his followers Bloch and Schilling read Salacia as the violent, gushing, overflowing water and Venilia as the tranquil, still or slowly-flowing water. Preller, Fowler, Petersmann, and Takacs took a broader view, reading Neptune's two paredrae as figures of worldly fertility: Salacia as lust, and Venilia as ingratiating attraction connected with love and the desire for reproduction. Preller noted that Venilia appeared in the indigitamenta, the Roman lists of deity functions, as a goddess of longing or desire, which he thought explained a name so similar to Venus.

• 5. Horses and the Earth-Shaker

  ›

  The Circus Flaminius near Neptune's temple was a racetrack, and that proximity was not accidental. Before Poseidon was known as the god of the sea, he was connected to the horse and may originally have been depicted in equine form. That link reflected his identity as the earth-shaker, whose violence was expressed both in earthquakes and in the psychopompous, otherworldly character the horse carried in ancient cultures.

  Neptune himself had no such direct horse connection. Instead, the Roman deity Consus carried it. Consus kept an underground altar in the valley of the Circus Maximus at the foot of the Palatine, the very site of horse races. On the summer Consualia, which fell on August 21st, horses and mules were crowned with flowers, paraded in procession, and then raced in the Circus. The same festival traditionally reenacted the abduction of the Sabine and Latin women, reflecting the sexual license associated with such celebrations. On that day, the Flamen Quirinalis and the Vestal Virgins made sacrifices on the underground altar of Consus.

  Dumézil interpreted Consus's name as deriving from condere, to hide or store, making him a god of stored grain in the same linguistic pattern as Sancus and Janus. The proximity of the two Consualia to the Opiconsivia, a winter festival on December 19th, supported the agricultural reading. Tertullian wrote in De Spectaculis that Roman tradition credited Consus with advising Romulus on the abduction of the Sabines.

  Influenced by the Greek Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon of horses), Consus and his horse-race festival were eventually reinterpreted as Neptunus equestris. For his underground altar, Consus was further identified with Poseidon Enosichthon, the earth-shaker. Martianus Capella places Neptune and Consus together in region X of heaven, possibly following an old Greek interpretive tradition or reflecting an Etruscan concept of a chthonic Neptune, one who dwelled below ground as much as beneath the sea.

• 6. Nethuns in Etruria

  ›

  The Etruscan name for Neptune was Nethuns, and he appears to have been an important figure in Etruscan religion. His name occurs twice on the Liver of Piacenza, a model liver used for divination: once on the outer rim of section seven, and once on the gallbladder of section 28. That second placement matched a belief recorded by Pliny the Elder that the gallbladder was sacred to Neptune. The name Nethuns also appears eight times across columns VII, IX, and XI of the Liber Linteus, the linen book that survives as the longest text in the Etruscan language.

  A bronze mirror from Tuscania dated to 350 BC, now held in the Vatican Museums in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, shows Nethuns in conversation with Usil (the sun) and Thesan (the goddess of dawn). Nethuns sits on the left, holding a double-ended trident in his right hand with his left arm raised as if giving instructions. Usil stands at the centre, holding the bow of Aplu (the Etruscan Apollo) in his right hand. Thesan stands on the right, with her hand on Usil's shoulder. Both listen intently to Nethuns' words. An anguiped demon holding two dolphins appears on the exergue beneath the scene. Scholars read the image as highlighting the joint importance of Nethuns and Aplu as deities of the worldly realm and the life cycle.

  The oldest Etruscan image of Neptune may be a fourth-century BC carved carnelian scarab from Vulci, now held in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale in the Cabinet des Medailles. It shows Nethuns kicking a rock and producing a spring. Another artifact from the Luynes collection depicts Nethunus striking the earth with his trident to cause a horse to spring from the ground. A late-fourth-century bronze mirror in the Vatican Museums (Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, C.S.E. Vaticano 1.5a) shows Neptune with Amymone, daughter of Danaus, whom he saves from assault by a satyr and then teaches the art of creating springs. The double-ended trident on the Tuscania mirror led scholars to suggest that Nethuns may have been understood as capable of wielding lightning bolts as well as governing water.

• 7. Ancestor of Nations

  ›

  Neptune was considered the legendary divine progenitor of the Falisci, a Latin people who called themselves Neptunia proles, "offspring of Neptune". He joined Mars, Janus, Saturn, and Jupiter in the small group of deities credited with fathering Latin tribes. Müller and Deeke interpreted this as reflecting a theology in which Neptune served as the divine ancestor of the Faliscan people through the heroes Messapus and Halesus, who was also the eponymous founder of Falerii. In the Aeneid, Messapus led the Falisci and others to war.

  Venilia, one of Neptune's paredrae, anchored her own genealogical threads. According to one source, she was the mother of Turnus and Iuturna by Daunus, king of the Rutulians. According to another, she was the partner of Janus, with whom she mothered the nymph Canens, who was loved by Picus. A legendary king named Venulus was remembered at Tibur and Lavinium. These mythological threads reinforced Neptune and his consorts as figures of generation and reproduction at the level of entire peoples and dynasties, not just individual mortals.

  Arnobius records that Neptune and Apollo were counted among the Etruscan Penates, the household and ancestral gods, and that these two deities were credited with building the walls of Ilium (Troy). That tradition made Neptune not only a progenitor of Latin peoples but a builder of the walls that, when they fell, set the entire Trojan genealogy in motion. Petersmann pointed to the Aeneid V 13-14, where a storm prompts the question: "What, why have so many clouds enringed the sky? What are you preparing, father Neptune?" The epithet "father" in Virgil's text carried the full weight of Neptune's dual role as sky-father of rain and divine ancestor of Rome's foundational lineage.