Egeria (mythology)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Topics in Roman mythology
Important Gods:
Jupiter Mars Quirinus Vesta Juno Fortuna	Minerva Mercury Vulcan Ceres Venus Lares
Legendary History
Roman religion
The Flamens
Greek/Roman myth compared
—
Other Rustic Gods:
Bona Dea Carmenta Camenae Dea Dia Convector	Flora Lupercus Pales Pomona Egeria

Egeria was a water nymph in Roman mythology. She was most famously the second wife and counselor of the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius.

Her name is used as an eponym for a woman advisor or counselor.

[edit] Function

Egeria gave wisdom and prophecy in return for simple libations of water or milk at her sacred grove, near where the Baths of Caracalla were erected in the 3rd century. The name Egeria may derive from "of the black poplar". Egeria was associated by Romans with Diana, and women in childbirth called for her aid, so she appears to have presided over childbirth as well, like the Greek goddess Ilithyia.

Egeria was later categorized by the Romans as one of the Camenae, minor deities who were equated with the Greek Muses as Rome fell under the cultural hegemony of Greece; so Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed Egeria among the Muses (ii. 6o).

[edit] Development

Egeria may predate Roman myth: she could have been of Etruscan origin, because she was a nymph consort to the Sabine Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome. Roman legend reports that Numa met her in her sacred grove, where she taught him to be a wise and just king (Livy i. 19). When Numa Pompilius died, Egeria changed into a well (Ovid, Metamorphoses xv. 479).

Image:Claude Lorrain 005.jpg

Besides the grove close by Rome, at Porta Capena, another one sacred to Egeria was located in the sacred forest of Aricia in Latium, the grove of Diana Nemorensis ("Diana of Nemi"). Image:Ninfeo egeria.jpg The ancient nympheum of Egeria survives in the Parco della Caffarella between the Appian Way and the even more ancient Via Latina [1], and was a favored picnic spot for 19th century Romans.

In the 2nd century, when Herodes Atticus recast an inherited villa nearby as a great landscaped estate the natural grotto was formalized as an arched interior with an apsidal end where a statue of Egeria once stood in a niche; the surfaces were enriched with revetments of green and white marble facings and green porphyry flooring and friezes of mosaic. The primeval spring, one of dozens of springs that flow into the river Almone, was made to feed large pools one of which was known as Lacus Salutaris the "Lake of Health". (Juvenal, Satire III . 17–20) regretted an earlier phase of architectural elaboration:

Nymph of the Spring! More honour’d hadst thou been,

If, free from art, an edge of living green,

Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed alone,

And marble ne’er profaned the native stone. (translated by William Gifford)

At Aricia there was also a Manius Egerius, a male counterpart of Egeria (Encyclopædia Britannica 1911).