Faunus and Fauna are the parents of Latinus, king of the Laurentines who welcomed Aeneas to Italy.
⚠ Virgil (Aeneid 7.47) names the nymph Marica as Latinus's mother rather than Fauna. Macrobius (Saturnalia 1.12.21) and Varro record the Fauna tradition.
Faunus lay with the nymph Marica at her sacred grove near the Liris, and she bore him Latinus, who would one day rule the Laurentine people and welcome the Trojans to Italian shores.
⚠ Varro (via Augustine, City of God 18.15) and Macrobius (Saturnalia 1.12.21) name Fauna rather than Marica as Latinus's mother.
Faunus was the son of Picus, the legendary woodpecker-king of Latium. Both father and son ruled as kings during the mythical era before Aeneas's arrival and were later worshipped as woodland deities.
Pan and Faunus are the Greek and Roman gods of the wild, both half-goat nature spirits haunting forests and mountainsides. Evander brought Pan's Arcadian cult to the Palatine, where the Romans knew his rites as the Lupercalia of Faunus.
Pomona shut herself inside her orchards and refused every suitor who came calling — Silvanus, Faunus, Priapus, and a host of other rustic gods all failed to win her, each turned away by the nymph who loved only her pruning-knife and her trees.
In a variant myth preserved by Lactantius, Faunus transformed himself into a serpent to assault his daughter Fauna after she resisted his advances. This origin story explained both the serpent's sacred role in Bona Dea's cult and the goddess's aversion to men.
Evander, the Arcadian exile who settled the Palatine Hill, established the Lupercalia in honor of Faunus at the site where he had founded his settlement Pallanteum.
In Ovid's Fasti, Faunus attempted to assault Omphale while she and Hercules had swapped clothing. Deceived by the feminine garments, Faunus was thrown across the room, explaining his priests' nudity at the Lupercalia.
Faunus prophesied that his granddaughter Lavinia should marry a foreign prince rather than the native Turnus, an oracle that guided Latinus to accept Aeneas as Lavinia's husband.
The Lupercal was sacred to Faunus, the wild god of the woodland, and on this ground each February his priests the Luperci sacrificed goats at the cave's mouth before racing naked around the Palatine, striking bystanders with strips of hide.
According to Plutarch, Numa Pompilius received prophecy from Faunus and Picus by capturing them with wine and binding them until they revealed divine wisdom for establishing Rome's religious institutions.
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