Sexual Life In Ancient Rome (Kegan Paul Library of Sexual Life)

Sexual Life In Ancient Greece

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He claimed the favours of Venus Victrix in his military success and Venus Genetrix as a personal, divine ancestress — apparently a long-standing family tradition among the Julii. When Caesar was assassinated, his heir, Augustus , adopted both claims as evidence of his inherent fitness for office, and divine approval of his rule. Vitruvius recommends that any new temple to Venus be sited according to rules laid down by the Etruscan haruspices , and built "near to the gate" of the city, where it would be less likely to contaminate "the matrons and youth with the influence of lust".

He finds the Corinthian style, slender, elegant, enriched with ornamental leaves and surmounted by volutes , appropriate to Venus' character and disposition. It was the largest temple in Ancient Rome. Venus was offered official state-sponsored cult in certain festivals of the Roman calendar. Her sacred month was April Latin Mensis Aprilis which Roman etymologists understood to derive from aperire , "to open," with reference to the springtime blossoming of trees and flowers.

Venus Verticordia was invented in BC, in response to advice from a Sibylline oracle during Rome's Punic Wars , [41] when a series of prodigies was taken to signify divine displeasure at sexual offenses among Romans of every category and class, including several men and three Vestal Virgins. At first, this statue was probably housed in the temple of Fortuna Virilis , perhaps as divine reinforcement against the perceived moral and religious failings of its cult.

In BC Venus Verticordia was given her own temple. During her rites, her image was taken from her temple to the men's baths, where it was undressed and washed in warm water by her female attendants, then garlanded with myrtle. Women and men asked Venus Verticordia's help in affairs of the heart, sex, betrothal and marriage. For Ovid , Venus's acceptance of the epithet and its attendant responsibilities represented a change of heart in the goddess herself.

Vinalia urbana April 23 , a wine festival shared by Venus and Jupiter , king of the gods. Venus was patron of " profane " wine, for everyday human use. Jupiter was patron of the strongest, purest, sacrificial grade wine, and controlled the weather on which the autumn grape-harvest would depend. At this festival, men and women alike drank the new vintage of ordinary, non-sacral wine in honour of Venus, whose powers had provided humankind with this gift. Upper-class women gathered at Venus's Capitoline temple, where a libation of the previous year's vintage, sacred to Jupiter, was poured into a nearby ditch.

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Vinalia Rustica August 19 , originally a rustic Latin festival of wine, vegetable growth and fertility. This was almost certainly Venus' oldest festival and was associated with her earliest known form, Venus Obsequens.

Kitchen gardens and market-gardens, and presumably vineyards were dedicated to her. Varro insists that the day was sacred to Jupiter, whose control of the weather governed the ripening of the grapes; but the sacrificial victim, a female lamb agna , may be evidence that it once belonged to Venus alone. A festival of Venus Genetrix September 26 was held under state auspices from 46 BC at her Temple in the Forum of Caesar , in fulfillment of a vow by Julius Caesar , who claimed her personal favour as his divine patron, and ancestral goddess of the Julian clan.

Caesar dedicated the temple during his unprecedented and extraordinarily lavish quadruple triumph. At the same time, he was pontifex maximus and Rome's senior magistrate; the festival is thought to mark the unprecedented promotion of a personal, family cult to one of the Roman state. Caesar's heir, Augustus, made much of these personal and family associations with Venus as an Imperial deity. Like other major Roman deities, Venus was given a number of epithets that referred to her different cult aspects, roles, and her functional similarities to other deities.

Her "original powers seem to have been extended largely by the fondness of the Romans for folk-etymology, and by the prevalence of the religious idea nomen-omen which sanctioned any identifications made in this way. Venus Acidalia , in Virgil 's Aeneid 1. Servius speculates this as reference to a "Fountain of Acidalia" fons acidalia where the Graces Venus' daughters were said to bathe; but he also connects it to the Greek word for "arrow", whence "love's arrows" and love's "cares and pangs".

Ovid uses acidalia only in the latter sense. It is likely a literary conceit, not a cultic epithet. Venus Caelestis is the earliest known Roman recipient of a taurobolium a form of bull sacrifice , performed at her shrine in Pozzuoli on 5 October This form of the goddess, and the taurobolium, are associated with the "Syrian Goddess", understood as a late equivalent to Astarte , or the Roman Magna Mater , the latter being another supposedly Trojan "Mother of the Romans" [54].

Venus Calva "Venus the bald one" , a legendary form of Venus, attested only by post-Classical Roman writings which offer several traditions to explain this appearance and epithet. In one, it commemorates the virtuous offer by Roman matrons of their own hair to make bowstrings during a siege of Rome. In another, king Ancus Marcius ' wife and other Roman women lost their hair during an epidemic; in hope of its restoration, unafflicted women sacrificed their own hair to Venus. Venus Cloacina "Venus the Purifier" ; a fusion of Venus with the Etruscan water goddess Cloacina , who had an ancient shrine above the outfall of the Cloaca Maxima , originally a stream, later covered over to function as Rome's main sewer.

The shrine contained a statue of Venus, whose rites were probably meant to purify the culvert's polluted waters and noxious airs.

Venus Erycina " Erycine Venus" , a Punic idol of Astarte captured from Sicily and worshiped in Romanised form by the elite and respectable matrons at a temple on the Capitoline Hill. A later temple, outside the Porta Collina and Rome's sacred boundary , may have preserved some Erycine features of her cult. It was considered suitable for "common girls" and prostitutes ". Venus Frutis honoured by all the Latins with a federal cult at the temple named Frutinal in Lavinium. Venus Felix "Lucky Venus" , probably a traditional epithet, later adopted by the dictator Sulla.

This epithet is also used for a specific sculpture at the Vatican Museums. Venus Genetrix "Venus the Mother" , as a goddess of motherhood and domesticity, with a festival on September 26, a personal ancestress of the Julian lineage and, more broadly, the divine ancestress of the Roman people.

Venus Kallipygos "Venus with the beautiful buttocks" , worshiped at Syracuse. Venus Libertina "Venus the Freedwoman " , probably arising through the semantic similarity and cultural inks between libertina as "a free woman" and lubentina possibly meaning "pleasurable" or "passionate". Further titles or variants acquired by Venus through the same process, or through orthographic variance, include Libentia, Lubentina, and Lubentini.

Venus Libitina links Venus to a patron-goddess of funerals and undertakers, Libitina ; a temple was dedicated to Venus Libitina in Libitina's grove on the Esquiline Hill , "hardly later than BC. Some sources associate her with the myrtle-tree. Christian writers described her as a goddess of sloth and laziness.

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It was supposedly funded by fines imposed on women found guilty of adultery. Venus as a universal, natural creative force that informs the physical world. She is addressed as "Alma Venus" "Mother Venus" by Lucretius in the introductory lines of his vivid, poetic exposition of Epicurean physics and philosophy, De Rerum Natura. She seems to have been a favourite of Lucretius' patron, Memmius. When Sulla captured Pompeii from the Samnites , he resettled it with his veterans and renamed it for his own family and divine protector Venus, as Colonia Veneria Cornelia for Sulla's claims of Venus' favour, see Venus Felix above.

Venus Verticordia "Venus the Changer of Hearts". See Veneralia in this article and main article, Veneralia. Venus Victrix "Venus the Victorious" , a Romanised aspect of the armed Aphrodite that Greeks had inherited from the East, where the goddess Ishtar "remained a goddess of war, and Venus could bring victory to a Sulla or a Caesar. In 55 BC he dedicated a temple to her at the top of his theater in the Campus Martius. She had a shrine on the Capitoline Hill , and festivals on August 12 and October 9. A sacrifice was annually dedicated to her on the latter date.

In neo-classical art, her epithet as Victrix is often used in the sense of 'Venus Victorious over men's hearts' or in the context of the Judgement of Paris e.

Canova 's Venus Victrix , a half-nude reclining portrait of Pauline Bonaparte. As with most major gods and goddesses in Roman mythology , the literary concept of Venus is mantled in whole-cloth borrowings from the literary Greek mythology of her counterpart, Aphrodite. In some Latin mythology, Cupid was the son of Venus and Mars , the god of war.

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At other times, or in parallel myths and theologies, Venus was understood to be the consort of Vulcan. Virgil , in compliment to his patron Augustus and the gens Julia , embellished an existing connection between Venus, whom Julius Caesar had adopted as his protectress, and Aeneas. Vergil's Aeneas is guided to Latium by Venus in her heavenly form, the morning star, shining brightly before him in the daylight sky; much later, she lifts Caesar's soul to heaven. Octavian's opponents, Antony , Cleopatra and the Egyptians, assisted by bizarre and unhelpful Egyptian deities such as "barking" Anubis , lose the battle.

In the interpretatio romana of the Germanic pantheon during the early centuries AD, Venus became identified with the Germanic goddess Frijjo , giving rise to the loan translation " Friday " for dies Veneris. Roman and Hellenistic art produced many variations on the goddess, often based on the Praxitlean type Aphrodite of Cnidus. Many female nudes from this period of sculpture whose subjects are unknown are in modern art history conventionally called 'Venus'es, even if they originally may have portrayed a mortal woman rather than operated as a cult statue of the goddess.

Venus became a popular subject of painting and sculpture during the Renaissance period in Europe. As a " classical " figure for whom nudity was her natural state, it was socially acceptable to depict her unclothed. As the goddess of sexuality , a degree of erotic beauty in her presentation was justified, which appealed to many artists and their patrons.

Over time, venus came to refer to any artistic depiction in post-classical art of a nude woman, even when there was no indication that the subject was the goddess. In the field of prehistoric art , since the discovery in of the so-called " Venus of Willendorf " small Neolithic sculptures of rounded female forms have been conventionally referred to as Venus figurines. Although the name of the actual deity is not known, the knowing contrast between the obese and fertile cult figures and the classical conception of Venus has raised resistance to the terminology.

Venus by Frans Floris , Hallwyl Museum.

Venus looking in the mirror, with Cupid attending, painting ca. Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel. Russian Venus by Boris Kustodiev.

When he emerges, he has to seek penance for his sins. The Dutch band Shocking Blue had a number one hit on the Billboard Top Ten in with the song titled " Venus ", which was also a hit when covered by Bananarama in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ancient Roman goddess of love, sex, and fertility. Venus on seashell, from the Casa di Venus, Pompeii. Marcus Aurelius head covered sacrificing at the Temple of Jupiter. Crispina , wife of Commodus , with enthroned Venus Felix holding Victory on reverse. Venus with a Mirror ca. This section needs additional citations for verification.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. August Learn how and when to remove this template message. Pokorny, Indo-European Etymological Dictionary , p. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies.

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