Diana- Roman GodDeity"Goddess of the Hunt"

The King of the Wood

At Lake Nemi in the Alban Hills, fifteen miles south of Rome, a priest stood guard in a sacred grove. He was always armed. He was always watching. Any runaway slave who broke a branch from a certain tree in that grove earned the right to fight him, and whoever won became the new priest. This was the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, and he held his office until someone killed him for it.

Servius linked the tree to the Golden Bough that Aeneas plucked before descending to the underworld. Strabo described the sanctuary overlooking the volcanic lake and the goddess whose worship demanded blood. The ritual persisted for centuries, long after Rome's other cults had grown civil and orderly. In Diana's grove, the old violence held.

Born on Delos

Diana and Apollo were twins, children of Jupiter and Latona. Diana was born first on the island of Delos and immediately turned to help her mother deliver her brother. From her first breath she was midwife: the goddess who would protect women in childbirth began by attending one.

Roman women dedicated offerings to her throughout pregnancy. Young girls, on the eve of marriage, brought their childhood toys to her shrine and left them there.

Actaeon

Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses. The hunter Actaeon, wandering through the forest after a day's kill, stumbled into a grotto where Diana was bathing with her nymphs. The nymphs screamed and clustered around the goddess, but she stood taller than all of them. She had no arrows within reach. She cupped water in her hands and flung it in his face.

Where the water struck, antlers sprouted. His hands became hooves. His hounds, fifty of them, caught the scent of a stag and ran him down. Ovid names the dogs. Actaeon's mind stayed human as his body betrayed him. He could not speak his own name. The pack tore him apart in a clearing, and his hunting companions called for Actaeon to come see the kill, not knowing the stag under their dogs was him.

The Aventine Temple

King Servius Tullius built Diana a temple on the Aventine Hill around 540 BCE, establishing her as a goddess of the Roman state. The temple served as a common shrine for the Latin peoples, with an inscribed bronze pillar recording the league's laws. Dionysius of Halicarnassus saw it still standing centuries later.

The Aventine lay outside Rome's sacred boundary, the pomerium, at the edge of the city.

The Ides of August

On August 13, Diana's festival, women processed to her grove at Nemi carrying torches through the dark. They came to fulfill vows made for safe childbirth or to ask the goddess's protection for pregnancies ahead. Slaves worshipped alongside free women. Diana's own priest had been a slave before he was a king.

Horace called her montium custos, watcher of the hills. Catullus praised her as queen of the wild forests and the hidden moon. But her oldest home was always Nemi: the volcanic lake, the grove, the armed priest in the dark, and the torches of women reflected in still water.