Minerva

Minerva was the Roman goddess of handicraft, skilled intelligence, and the arts, and with Jupiter and Juno completed the Capitoline Triad at the heart of Roman state cult. Her name is Italic, and her cult reached Rome partly through the Etruscans, among whom she was Menrva; from an early period she was thoroughly identified with the Greek Athena and took over that goddess's attributes of the helmet, spear, aegis, and owl, and her birth, fully armed, from the head of Jupiter.

What Minerva chiefly governed was skill, the intelligence expressed in making and doing: weaving and spinning, carpentry and metal-work, the trades of the craftsman, but also the arts of the physician, the schoolteacher, the sculptor, and the poet. Her warlike aspect, inherited from Athena, made her a goddess of strategic and disciplined war rather than of the battle-frenzy that belonged to Mars.

Minerva's own origins lie outside Rome altogether. She descends from the Etruscan goddess Menrva, herself likely shaped by early contact with Greek Athena, and reached Rome through the same channel of Etruscan influence that gave the city its early kings. The archaic Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, worshipped together in one temple on the Capitoline Hill, is widely thought by scholars of Roman religion to reflect this Etruscan inheritance rather than any native Latin arrangement, since a comparable grouping of three principal deities sharing one large temple is a recognisable pattern at other Etruscan sanctuaries, and the Tarquin kings under whom the Capitoline temple was built and planned were themselves of Etruscan background.

Only later did Minerva's Etruscan and Italic character fold almost completely into that of Athena, so that by the historical period Romans described her almost entirely in Greek terms, wisdom, strategic warfare, weaving and craft, while the Etruscan Menrva behind her name survived mainly in inscriptions and mirror-back engravings rather than in Roman literature, which had already forgotten, or chose not to record, how much of the goddess it inherited from a non-Latin source.

Domitian's devotion to Minerva produced his last major building project, a temple to the goddess set within a new forum built to connect the older Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Peace, a narrow, elongated space later called the Forum Transitorium because it mainly served as a passage between them. Domitian did not live to see it finished; he was assassinated in 96 CE, and it was his successor Nerva, whose own reign was brief and troubled, who completed and dedicated the temple, giving the forum his own name even though its design and purpose belonged to the emperor he replaced.

The temple itself was demolished centuries later, its columns and marble stripped for other buildings, and only one fragment of its colonnade, a section of wall still known as the Colonnacce, survives above ground in modern Rome, decorated with relief carvings that include scenes of Minerva presiding over women's household crafts such as spinning and weaving. That the most visible physical trace of Domitian's personal devotion to the goddess is now a single ruined wall says something about how thoroughly later Roman opinion, hostile to Domitian's memory, allowed his building projects to decay once his dynasty had fallen.