Aventine Triad- Roman GroupCollective
Also known as: Plebeian Triad
Domains
Description
Three deities share one temple on the Aventine, planted outside the patrician pomerium where the common people could worship their own. Ceres, Liber, and Libera gave the plebs a divine mirror of the Capitoline power they could not yet claim.
Mythology & Lore
The Temple on the Aventine
In 496 BCE, famine struck Rome. The Senate consulted the Sibylline Books, and the Books prescribed the worship of three deities together: Ceres, Liber, and Libera. The consul Aulus Postumius vowed a temple to them. Three years later, after the first secession of the plebs had shaken the Republic, the consul Spurius Cassius dedicated it on the Aventine Hill. Livy records the dedication in Ab Urbe Condita (2.33), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (6.17.2-4) preserves the political context surrounding it.
The Aventine stood outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city proper, and had long been plebeian territory. The Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva looked down from the hill where patrician power sat. This new temple answered it from below.
The Plebeian Stronghold
The temple became more than a place of worship. The plebeian aediles kept their office within its precinct, and decrees of the Senate were deposited there under their custody. The Cerealia, Ceres's festival each April, centered on the Aventine temple and spilled into the Circus Maximus with games and processions.
Pliny the Elder records that two Greek artists, Damophilus and Gorgasus, decorated the interior with painted terracotta reliefs. Their work made the temple one of the first buildings in Rome to bear Greek hands on Roman walls. The reliefs became famous in their own right, and when the temple was later rebuilt, the old terracottas were carefully removed and preserved in wooden frames.