Juno

Juno was among the greatest of the Roman deities, the consort and sister of Jupiter and, with him and Minerva, one of the three gods of the Capitoline Triad whose temple crowned the Capitoline Hill and stood at the centre of Roman state religion. From an early date she was identified with the Greek Hera, and much of the mythology told of her, her jealousies, her quarrels with Jupiter, her hostility to his mortal loves, was drawn from the Greek stories. Yet her Roman character was broader and more civic than Hera's. She was pre-eminently a protector of the Roman state and of the Roman people, invoked at moments of crisis, and her cults reached back into the oldest layers of Latin religion at Rome, Lanuvium, Veii, and Praeneste. As Juno Regina, the Queen, she received the evocatio by which Rome ritually summoned an enemy's tutelary goddess to change sides, most famously from besieged Veii.

Roman religion multiplied its gods by function and place, and Juno appears under a string of cult-titles that show the range of her care. Juno Lucina was the goddess who brought children to the light, invoked in childbirth and honoured at the Matronalia. Juno Sospita, the Saviour, worshipped at Lanuvium in goatskin and with spear and shield, was a warlike protectress whose rites Rome maintained as a public cult. Juno Moneta, the Warner or Adviser, had her temple on the Capitoline arx; because the Roman mint was housed beside it, her epithet Moneta became, through Latin, the ancestor of the English words money and mint.

Roman thought also gave every woman her own guardian spirit, the iuno, the female counterpart of a man's genius, so that the goddess was mirrored in the life of each individual. This layering, one named goddess expressed through many localised and functional cults, is characteristic of the Roman way with the divine.

Juno's great civic festival was the Matronalia on 1 March, the feast of Roman married women, who prayed to Juno Lucina for their households and their marriages while husbands offered gifts, an occasion often compared, loosely, to a day honouring wives and mothers. Her temples were many: Juno Regina on the Aventine, vowed during the war with Veii and dedicated in 392 BC; Juno Moneta on the citadel, whose sacred geese were said to have roused the garrison and saved the Capitol from a night attack by the Gauls in 390 BC, an event Romans commemorated ever after. As one of the Capitoline gods she shared in the supreme rites of the state, and under the empire her image and epithets attached readily to the women of the imperial house. Her enduring emblems, the peacock, the diadem, and the sceptre, mark her out in Roman art as the matron-queen of heaven.

At Lanuvium, south of Rome, Juno was worshipped as Juno Sospita, the Saviour, shown in a strikingly archaic goat-skin cloak with horns, and Roman writers including Propertius and Aelian describe an unusual annual rite there in which young women brought cakes to a sacred grove and offered them to a serpent kept in a cave; if the snake accepted the food the girl was judged chaste, and if it refused, disaster and poor harvests were feared to follow, a piece of local Latin folk-religion so distinctive that Cicero singled out Lanuvium's cult of Juno as a case where an Italian town's own ancient rites had been formally taken into the Roman state religion rather than replaced by it after Rome's conquest of Latium.