They draw you down from the sky, Jupiter, and that is why more recent generations still worship you today, and call you Elicius. It is certain that the summit of the Aventine wood trembled, and the earth sank beneath the weight of Jupiter.
Dismayed by an unprecedented flurry of thunderbolts, the pious King Numa sets out to expiate the omen. His divine consort Egeria advises him to learn the ritus piandi (291) from Picus and Faunus, who will, however, only reveal the necessary information under compulsion. Numa makes plans to ambush the gods, taking up position in a cave within a grove ‘under the Aventine, black with the shade of the holm oak, at sight of which you would say, “A spirit is here”’ (lucus Auentino suberat niger ilicis umbra, | quo posses uiso dicere ‘numen inest’, 295–6). The description of this numinous location continues (297–9):
In the middle was a meadow, and an unceasing stream of water, covered with green moss, flowed from the rock. From it Faunus and Picus, unaccompanied, were in the habit of drinking.
Once captured by the king, Faunus and Picus tell Numa that only Jupiter himself can be consulted about Jupiter's own domain (if we read tecta at 316; Jupiter's weapons, if we read tela, and there's little to choose between those readings),Footnote 2 but that with their help Numa may be able to draw Jupiter down from the sky to answer his enquiry.
In the passage that heads this note the two rustic deities do indeed draw Jupiter to earth; and subsequently, in a battle of wits between the altorum rexque paterque deum and Numa, a peculiar ritual of expiation is agreed, involving offerings of an onion, human hair, and a small fish. Further information on the character of the cult at the altar of Jupiter Elicius is forthcoming from Varro (Ling. 6.94), Livy (1.20.7), Pliny the Elder (HN 2.140), Plutarch (Vit. Num. 15.3–6) and Arnobius (Nat. 5.1 = Valerius Antias HRR fr. 6 Peter),Footnote 3 the latter two close to Ovid's account and thus helpful for elucidating a shared source or sources.Footnote 4 At no point does one get the impression that the ancients found the cult any less mysterious than modern scholars.
The purpose of this note is simply to show that, in the course of describing Faunus and Picus' elicitation of Jupiter from the sky, from which Ovid explicitly etymologizes ‘Elicius’, the peculiar title of the aspect of Jupiter associated with ‘the prodigies imparted by lightning or other visible sign’ (Livy 1.20.7) or even the summoning of thunderbolts (Pliny, HN 2.140),Footnote 5 Ovid insinuates another aetiology: the detail in line 330 that ‘the earth sank down beneath the weight of Jupiter’ (terra … subsedit pondere pressa Iouis) in fact presents a mythical explanation of a prominent topographical feature in the vicinity of the scene of these events.
That scene now requires our attention. It turns out not only that Ovid is describing a place readily identifiable to Roman readers, but also that, rather untypically for scholarship on the topography of ancient Rome, there is a clear and long-standing consensus as to where it was. In his comprehensive historical survey of the Aventine, Alfred Merlin, following Rubino and Gilbert,Footnote 6 identified the grove, cave, and spring under the Aventine where Ovid places the ambush of Faunus and Picus with the grove, cave, and spring of the Bona Dea temple (cf. Prop. 4.9.24, 25, 33, 35, 53, 59–60). The latter shrine stood on a gentle slope below the Saxum, ‘the cliff which forms the conspicuous N angle of the SE summit, the “Lesser Aventine”’,Footnote 7 the site where tradition placed Remus' unlucky taking of the auspices (Ov. Fast. 5.148–54).Footnote 8 The late antique Regional Catalogues (Libellus de regionibus urbis Romae, p. 92, 14 Nordh) record in Region XII, which encompassed this section of the ancient city, an aedes Bonae Deae Subsaxanae,Footnote 9 and a recently discovered fragment of the Severan Marble Plan depicts a section of the sanctuary, accompanied by the surviving letters SAXSA/NA, without doubt what remains of BONA DEA SUBSAXSANA.Footnote 10
The place where Numa traps Faunus and Picus and has his dialogue with Jupiter is also said to be on the Aventine; as Bömer writes, when Ovid remarks that Auentinae tremuisse cacumina siluae (329) he is not describing the swaying of treetops (which would hardly be an appropriately supernatural phenomenon) but rather using an expression effectively synonymous with Auentinum cacumen at Fast. 4.816, which describes Remus' augural station on the Saxum. However, what clinches the identification of Faunus and Picus' spring on the Aventine with the Bona Dea precinct is the very close connection that existed between the two indigenous deities Bona Dea and Faunus, seemingly female and male counterparts: they are variously described as husband and wife, father and daughter, or brother and sister.Footnote 11 (An extra consequence of identifying Faunus and Picus' spring with the Bona Dea sanctuary is that we should probably print saxo at 298 as Saxo.) As for the altar of Jupiter Elicius supposedly established after Numa's exploit, Ovid's account implies that it was close at hand, presumably in the same grove (so infused with divinity, 296) under the Aventine. Pliny, HN 2.140 might be understood to imply that the ara of Jupiter Elicius was situated, and his sacra took place, in a lucus.
The Aventine hill, ‘the southernmost of the seven hills of Rome’, was really two hills, ‘divided into two heights, the Aventinus Maior and Aventinus Minor, or Aventine and Little Aventine (sometimes also called pseudo-Aventine), with a distinct cleft between them, down which ran the Vicus Portae Raudusculanae (Viale Aventino, Via di Porta S. Paolo)’.Footnote 12 The evidence suggests that, while the Aventine was considered ‘a single geographical unit’Footnote 13 throughout Antiquity, a distinction between the two parts of the hill was also recognized. Skutsch stressed that distinction in the process of explaining Ennius' description of the taking of the auspices by Romulus and Remus,Footnote 14 proposing that, while Ennius' Romulus stood in alto Auentino, ‘the Aventine proper to the north of the via portae Raudusculanae’, Remus took his stand where later tradition placed him (most clearly Ovid at Fasti 5.149–52), ‘on the Saxum, the highest elevation on the north side of the south-eastern hill, above the shrine of the Bona Dea Subsaxana’.Footnote 15 To the Lesser Aventine, by Skutsch's theory, Ennius attached a name surviving in texts relating to the Aventine, Mons Murcus.
The shrine of the Bona Dea, and by extension the altar of Jupiter Elicius, was thus located below the Saxum at the northern extremity of the Lesser Aventine. Latest thinking is undecided between the northern side of the Saxum cliff (and thus inside the Servian Wall) or its eastern slope (outside the wall),Footnote 16 although investigation of a stretch of Republican-era wall to the north of the Saxum and ‘not far from the vicus Piscinae Publicae’ by Di Manzano and Quinto,Footnote 17 plausibly identified as part of the enclosure wall of the Bona Dea sanctuary,Footnote 18 suggests a location on the northern slope.Footnote 19 At any rate, if the two cult places were close to the Saxum, they were also adjacent to the ‘distinct cleft’ or ‘depression’Footnote 20 that separates the Lesser from the Greater Aventine, through which once ran the Vicus Piscinae Publicae and its extension, the Vicus Portae Raudusculanae. It is to this cleft, I propose, that Ovid is alluding when he talks of the impact of Jupiter's divine weight on the ground of the Aventine hill, terraque subsedit pondere pressa Iouis.
The Fasti, a poem about Roman time, is also necessarily about Roman space, bearing the same wilful but intimate relation to a map of the city of Rome as the Metamorphoses does to a map of the world: ‘It was not possible … to consider the organisation of Roman time without engaging also with the spatial context through which Roman time was articulated.’Footnote 21 Here, in a characteristically witty obiter dictum, a double hill somewhat awkwardly saddled with a single name and identity is provided with an aetiological explanation, perhaps (despite constat in 329) the poet's own innovation: the Aventine had indeed been single and indivisible, until Jove himself visited Rome and left his indelible mark on the landscape.
The Greater and Lesser Aventine, and the cleft running between them. The church of S. Balbina, on the Lesser Aventine, marks the location of the Saxum, and the black lines above S. Balbina the walls that have been supposed to be part of the enclosure of the Bona Dea sanctuary. The image is from Murray’s Handbook of Rome and its environs (London, 18699).
