Venus's cult at Rome was enlarged in a moment of real crisis. After the catastrophic defeat at Lake Trasimene in 217 BCE, early in the Second Punic War, the Sibylline Books were consulted and prescribed a new temple to Venus Erycina, imported from her ancient shrine on Mount Eryx in Sicily, a sanctuary with its own long tradition of ritual prostitution in service of the goddess. Quintus Fabius Maximus vowed the temple, and it was dedicated on the Capitoline itself within two years, an unusually rapid and prominent honour that shows how seriously Rome took a foreign form of Venus during its darkest military hour.
The choice was not arbitrary: Eryx sat near territory contested between Rome and Carthage, and adopting its goddess was also a claim on the ground she watched over. A second, more modest temple to Venus Erycina was later built outside the city walls for the goddess in her original, less respectable Sicilian character, physically separating the state-sanctioned Capitoline Venus from the folk cult of love and fertility that had crossed the sea with her name. The episode is a clear case of Rome absorbing a foreign deity for reasons of politics and war rather than theology, and Venus's several distinct cult titles more generally, Genetrix, Victrix, Verticordia and Erycina among them, functioned as effectively separate cults addressed to different facets of one goddess rather than as mere poetic variations on a single unified figure.