Persuading a City's Own Goddess to Change Sides

Livy's account of Camillus's siege of the Etruscan city of Veii describes the evocatio in vivid procedural detail: before the final assault, Camillus vowed a temple at Rome and addressed Veii's patron goddess directly, inviting her by every title that might apply to leave her city and its coming destruction for a new home and a grander cult among the victors. The rite assumed that a god's protection over a place was not an unbreakable bond but a relationship that could, in principle, be renegotiated, so that even a besieged city's last real defense, its own tutelary deity's protective presence, might be talked away before a single wall was breached.

Once Veii fell, its patron goddess was identified with Juno and brought to Rome as Juno Regina, given a new temple on the Aventine Hill, formally completing the transaction the rite had proposed and folding a former enemy's own goddess into Rome's expanding pantheon as living proof the evocatio had worked exactly as intended. The temple Camillus had vowed was duly built, and Juno Regina's cult continued at Rome for centuries afterward, giving later Romans a permanent, visitable monument to a single ritual moment in a siege three and a half centuries earlier.