Venus Verticordia ("Changer of Hearts" or "Heart-Turner") was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus conceived as having the power to convert either virgins or sexually active women from dissolute desire (libido) to sexual virtue (pudicitia). Under this title, Venus was especially cultivated by married women, and on 1 April she was celebrated at the Veneralia festival with bathing.
The epithet Verticordia derives from the Latin words verto, "turn", and cor, the heart as "the seat of subjective experience and wisdom". The conversion, however, was thought of as occurring in the mind – the mens or "ethical core". Women were thus viewed as having the moral agency necessary for shaping society, albeit in roles differing from men.
The cult of Venus Verticordia was established with the installation of a statue (simulacrum) around the time of the Second Punic War, before 204 BC, possibly 220 BC. Its initial location is uncertain – generally, in the Vallis Murcia, between the northern slope of the Minor Aventine and the farther end of the Circus Maximus. The founding statue was possibly dedicated in the shrine of either Venus Obsequens or Venus Erycina, or it may have been placed in an open-air precinct (templum) where her temple was later erected.
The legislative process behind the dedication was similar to the establishing of other women-centered cults such as that of Fortuna Muliebris or the religious reparations owed to Juno Regina in 207 BC. The senate compiled a list of one hundred matronae (respectable married women) eligible to make the dedication, then narrowed their number by sortition (drawing lots) to ten. The ten women themselves nominated a Sulpicia as the most worthy of the honor among them. Pliny the Elder implies that it was the first time a woman was selected for an official religious task in this way, and says that this process was followed again for the importation of the cult of the Magna Mater by Claudia Quinta.
The Temple of Venus Verticordia (aedes) was one of several established by the Roman Republic in response to a perceived outbreak of female debauchery, in this instance incestum, the violation of religious chastity by three of the six women serving as "professionally chaste" Vestals. The women were tried and convicted, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Verticordia's temple was the last of eight the Romans built in accordance with Sibylline authority, dedicated to ten different deities, seven of them goddesses. The earlier cult statue of Verticordia may have been moved there. Work on the temple was started in 114 BC. Its precise location in the Vallis Murcia is unclear, but possibly near the shrine of Murcia at the Circus Maximus.
The narratives that explain the founding of Venus Verticordia's cult blend history and myth, as is characteristic of Roman mythology and its focus on human actions within a divine order that supports the Roman state. The Sulpicia given the honor of dedicating the cult statue in the 3rd century BC may or may not be a verifiable historical figure.} Ancient sources say that both the dedication of the statue and the building of the temple were religious responses during a time of military and social crisis.
The temple was built in response to a prodigy (prodigium) described by Orosius as obscene and sad. The daughter of a member of the equestrian order was horseback riding when she was struck dead by a lightning bolt. Her body was discovered with the tongue hanging out and her skirts exposing her genitals.
A prodigy was recognizable as a sign of divine displeasure because it violated the orderliness of the physical world, and the religious offense that caused it had to be identified and expiated. In this case, the prodigy was linked to Vestals committing repeated acts of sexual misconduct with several members of the equestrian order. The decemviri (a commission of ten men) had the Sibylline Books consulted, and the building of a temple to Venus Verticordia was deemed the appropriate response.
The founding of Verticordia's temple, however, was insufficient to avert the panic, and was supplemented by a rare human sacrifice in ancient Rome—of two couples, one Greek and the other Celtic. Livy calls the practice "hardly Roman", but it seems to have been the second time this rite was enacted, the first carried out during the Hannibalic War.
The feast day of Venus took place on 1 April (the Kalends), though the name Veneralia does not appear in sources until the Calendar of 354 AD. Verticordia may have supplanted or been a refinement of an older form of Venus originally honored on the Kalends, and she shares the day with Fortuna Virilis, an older instantiation of the goddess Fortuna whose origins are unknown. The Kalends of April was one of the three days during the year when a woman expected to receive a gift from her male romantic partner, the other two being her birthday and the Sigillaria in December. No games (ludi) were held as they were for many other religious festivals.
The whole month of April, Latin Aprilis, was under the guardianship (tutela) of Venus, and Ovid and others took Aphrodite, the name of her Greek counterpart, as the origin of the word Aprilis. The more common view among the Romans was that Aprilis derived from the verb aperire, "to open", according to Verrius Flaccus because it was the month when "fruits and flowers and animals and seas and lands do open". April and June were the most propitious months for weddings, as they were presided over by Venus and then Juno as a goddess of marriage. The April religious calendar was dominated by female rites, with major festivals for the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") and Ceres as well as Venus.
The most detailed source on the Veneralia is the Kalends of April section in Book 4 of Ovid's poem about the Roman calendar, the Fasti, but the word Verticordia is metrically impossible in elegiac couplets and thus can't be used as an epithet for Venus in the poem. Ovid refers to Verticordia, however, in a line that plays on the etymology of the epithet: inde Venus verso nomina corde tenet, "and from her change of heart Venus holds her title."
According to Ovid, the cult image of Venus was bathed and redressed in the ritual act of lavatio. The goddess's rich adornments and gold necklaces were removed, and after she had been washed head to toe and polished dry, she was decked with not only her jewellery but also fresh roses and other flowers. Rose adornment was also part of the Vinalia, the wine festival on 23 April when Venus Erycina was celebrated. Ovid is the only source for Verticordia's lavatio, and the earliest for the bathing of the cult statue of the Magna Mater, which was carried to the river Almo during her festival 4–10 April, the Megalensia.
At the Veneralia, matrons and brides were to supplicate Verticordia, seeking physical beauty, socially approved behaviors, and a good reputation, while women of lesser standing (mulieres humiliores) celebrated Fortuna Virilis by burning incense. The celebrants of Verticordia bathed communally, crowned in wreaths of myrtle, a plant especially associated with Venus. Ovid explains the origin of myrtle-wearing with a brief version of the myth of Venus Anadyomene rising naked from the sea. As she was wringing out her wet hair on the shore, she became aware of a rowdy band of satyrs watching her. Unlike the usual myth in which an enraged goddess punishes the man who has seen her, Ovid's Venus simply covers herself with myrtle and goes about her pleasurable business. "Nakedness, baths, and female sexuality" form a kind of "expressive module" for the holiday. "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, descendants of Aeneas, son of Venus.
Participants also emulated Venus in consuming cocetum, a slurry of poppy seed, milk, and honey that served a ceremonial purpose similar to the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The festival of Ceres – Greek Demeter for whom poppy was emblematic – began 12 April with games and performances in the Circus Maximus and concluded 19 April with the Cerialia. The poppy beverage may have helped relax or sedate anxious virgin brides, or had an aphrodisiac or more strongly narcotic or hallucinatory effect, depending on the opiate content of the poppy. Ovid offers another origin story (aetion) for brides consuming the cocetum, saying that Venus herself drank it on her wedding night. But he undermines an image of Venus as a model wife with the sexuality of Venus as a woman, framing her feast day with reminders of Mars, her regular consort to whom she was not married; she drank the cocetum to endure her arranged marriage to the unattractive but eager bridegroom Vulcan, and her son Aeneas, father of the Roman people, was born from her adulterous desire for the mortal Anchises.
Ovid's artistic intermingling of Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis and his social commentary on the division of the celebrants is "notoriously controversial" and "puzzlingly paradigmatic" as a historical source. The name Fortuna Virilis means something closer to "Good Luck in Men" than "Manly Fortune", or "Lucky Guy" if the women's actions are meant as a "privileged exhibition" for the men – the women may be hesitant that taking off their clothes exposes physical imperfection, but that isn't what Fortuna Virilis lets men see. Her origins are no later than the 4th century BC, predating the dedication of Verticordia's statue, and Plutarch traces a temple of Fortuna Virilis back to the semilegendary king Servius Tullius, to whom many such foundings were attributed in myth. In the late 4th century BC, public bathing might have taken place at the public pool (piscina publica), but the appearance of the women at the men's public baths has to be a later development, since these were not in use until the 2nd century BC.
The 1 April feast day was celebrated widely, perhaps universally, by Roman women, but ancient sources seem to indicate social stratification in what aspects they might participate in. The bathing and adornment of Verticordia's statue could involve only a limited number of women, and selectivity of merit was inherent in the establishment of her cult. The women who attended on her wore the respectable attire of the matron. Women of lesser status attended to Fortuna Virilis, and then they – or perhaps all women – crowned themselves in myrtle like Venus and went to share a "fecundating" bath in public view of men, who watch as the satyrs did. 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, and T. P. Wiseman conjectured that in the 4th century BC, the rites on the Kalends of April may even have involved men dressing as satyrs.
The mutual desire of Mars and Venus being fundamental to the Roman state, the role of Verticordia was not to inhibit sexuality but to promote libido within marriage, which Cicero described as "the seedbed of the republic" (seminarium rei publicae). About nine months later, the Carmentalia that celebrated the goddess of childbirth was for all women giving birth, a festival unusually without social segregation.
By the early second century AD, the rituals of Fortuna Virilis on 1 April had been absorbed into the cult of Venus Verticordia. By late antiquity the drinking of cocetum and practices associated with Fortuna Virilis seem to have fallen into disuse. The Veneralia may have been the setting Augustine of Hippo had in mind in a sermon on Mary and Martha, dated around AD 393, when he writes that "we" should not get carnally distracted by "banquets of Venus" (epulae venerales) but practice moderate behavior (modestia). Augustine advised forbearance, not passion, as a way to approach the secular banquet of Venus, which he seems to regard as "rather a respectable affair in 'celebration of a life of harmony and fullness'". The 6th-century antiquarian Ioannes Lydus, writing in Greek, says that women of higher rank had worshipped Aphrodite on 1 April "to achieve concord and a modest life", with no mention of Fortuna Virilis.
Later in April, a day comparable to the Greek Aphrodisia festival was devoted to Venus Erycina extra portam Collinam, "Venus of Eryx outside the Colline Gate" and hence outside the sacred boundary of Rome (pomerium) as foreign rites traditionally were. Sex workers (meretrices) attended while socially respectable women celebrated the same goddess with "cleaned up" rites at the Vinalia festival on the Capitoline. The lower-class women (mulieres humiliores) who celebrated Fortuna Virilis on the Kalends of April would have included prostitutes as well. Sarah Pomeroy believed that the humiliores comprised only prostitutes, but this is not standard usage of the word, and Ovid undermines even the usual social distinction between the humiliores and women of the upper social orders in the festivities of 1 April.
Venus Erycina was a Punic cult 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. At her second temple on the Capitoline, Erycina was eventually assimilated to Venus Genetrix, Venus as the generative mother of the Roman people, a moral amelioration of Erycina that indicates "prostitution was not the only item in her portfolio." The development of Erycina's cult shows the counterbalancing of an ideation of sexual women as whores by advancing the more self-controlled form of sexuality (pudicitia) for women within marriage, which Verticordia also embodied.
The social separation between Fortuna Virilis and Venus Verticordia, and between the two temples of Venus Erycina, had played out earlier in similar dynamic tension as the Conflict of the Orders sought resolution. A patrician woman named Verginia had married a plebeian, Lucius Volumnius, and consequently was deemed ineligible to participate in the cult of Pudicitia Patricia, "Pudicitia for Patricians". In response, she established a shrine to Pudicitia Plebeia as an alternative for socially aspiring plebeians in 295 BC. Pudicitia was the public moral arena in which women competed as men did in virtus, "manly" excellence. Only univirae, married women who had been with only one man, could be admitted to either cult of Pudicitia, emphasizing a woman's success at the self-management of her own sexuality beyond social expectations or male desire. The shrines of both Pudicitia Plebeia and Venus Verticordia were established in response to prodigies at a time of crisis in the Roman state; it is a frequent pattern that repairing social disorder required the public demonstration of the sexual and moral integrity of Roman women.
The location of the Temple of Venus Verticordia in the Vallis Murcia also raises questions about her relation to the obscure goddess Murcia, the varied spelling of whose name led to her identification with Venus Murtea or Myrtea, "Venus of the Myrtle Grove". Servius says that Verticordia's temple precinct (fanum) was near the Circus Maximus in a former myrtle grove, which was also the site of the Rape of the Sabine Women. As a pretext for the founding act of bride abduction, Romulus had invited the Sabine families to a festival in honor of the god named by Plutarch as Poseidon Hippios ("Horse Poseidon"), Latinized as Neptunus Equester ("Equestrian Neptune") and identified with the archaic god Consus. The underground altar of Consus was located at one of the two points of the Circus Maximus where the chariots turned, the meta Murciae, near the myrtle grove. In earliest times, the site was largely flooded in April, a terrain supporting the conceptualization of Venus rising from the "sea" among the myrtles, but in the driest months, the area was devoted to horse races, especially in August, when Venus's second Vinalia of the year was held on the 19th, two days before the horse-racing festival of Consus.
The Greek equivalent of Verticordia, Aphrodite Apostrophia ("Aphrodite of Turning Away") was complementary to Demeter Erinys. The April rites of Roman Ceres were not based on the primary Greek myth of Demeter – the abduction of her daughter Persephone to serve as the bride of Pluto – and yet Ovid chooses to narrate it at disproportionate length in his treatment of April in the Fasti. This choice may have been motivated by the complex nexus in Greek myth and cult between Demeter Erinys and Aphrodite Apostrophia. Demeter Erinys ("Furious Demeter") represents the rightful anger the goddess felt after she herself was raped during her search for her daughter, having turned herself into a mare to try to evade Poseidon only to have him transform into a stallion to mount her. Erinys is the drive for vengeance, rendered into lawfulness by Demeter Thesmophoros ("Bringer of Laws", thesmoi) who preserves family order and the state. Although Demeter's Thesmophoria is framed broadly as an all-female "fertility" festival, the second day became a "forum for crime detection and dispute resolution" pervaded by the complaint of the wronged goddess.
The animalizing potential of desire is "turned away" by Aphrodite Apostrophia (from apo-, "away" and strophein, "to turn") – so called because she diverted the human race from acting on desires that were contrary to nomos (ἐπιθυμίας τε ἀνόμου) and from unholy deeds (ἔργων ἀνοσίων), such as the incestuous union that produced Adonis, the beautiful youth unsatisfactorily loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone. In Verticordia's mythology, the threat of bestial sexuality is represented by the satyrs in Ovid's account of Verticordia's bath, and by the prodigy of the horse-riding virgin, whose body is found with signs that ordinarily might be interpreted as rape..
The "turning" or conversion of Venus Verticordia is not a suppression of sexual desire but a purposing of its power for social benefit in a display of personal excellence. The Venus Pudica statuary type displays the goddess naked, and the placement of her hands is not obviously defensive but rather instructs the viewer toward the erogenous zones of the female body. Both the Venus Anadyomene and Pudica types are associated with rising from the water, sometimes indicated by a hydria (water vessel) or dolphin, with bathing a reenactment of the goddess's birth from the sea, but Pudica is well coiffed. Roman matrons were not portrayed with the loose, wet locks of Anadyomene, which released an eroticism that might not be fully under control; elaborately bound-up hairstyles were not simply ornamental but moral. The sometime presence of a cloth or drapery is ambiguous as to whether Pudica has just removed her garment or is about to put it on, and in some versions, such as the Mazarin Venus, suggests a striptease. Just as women reenacted the role of Venus in the rites of 1 April, they had themselves portrayed quite literally as Venus in sculpture, with their own portrait head placed on a conventional body type of the goddess – a costly form of self-expression that would have been available only to elite women.
The first Roman shrine (aedes) to an instantiation of Venus had been built during the Third Samnite War in 296 BC, located near the racetrack of the Circus Maximus. Funded by fines imposed by the curule aedile Fabius Gurges on matronae for engaging in sexual misconduct (stuprum), it was dedicated to Venus Obsequens – "Compliant" Venus. During the wars of the Middle Republic that expanded Rome's presence throughout the Mediterranean world, and especially during the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), social and economic power among Roman women of the propertied classes increased, as they stepped in to manage domestic matters in the absence of men deployed at war. At the same time, anxieties about untethered women led to regulation of their behaviors in relation to men through both legislation and religious cultivation, counterbalancing their contributions to the Roman state and relative autonomy on the home front with expectations of loyalty and self-discipline expressed sexually.