Lake Nemi- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark"Diana's Mirror"

Diana's Mirror

The lake sat in a collapsed volcanic crater in the Alban Hills, sixteen miles south of Rome. The water was dark and still. The Romans called it Speculum Dianae, Diana's Mirror, because on calm days the surface held the surrounding forest in perfect reflection. The sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis stood on the northern shore, active from at least the sixth century BCE into the imperial period. Nemus means grove, and the grove gave Nemi its name. Women came to ask Diana's protection in childbirth and left votive offerings shaped like the body parts they wanted healed. Fugitive slaves who reached the grove gained the goddess's protection.

The Rex Nemorensis

The grove had a priest called the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood. He was a runaway slave. He had won his office by entering the sacred grove, plucking a golden branch from a certain tree, and killing the previous King in single combat. Now he stood guard among the trees with a drawn sword, watching for the next runaway who would come to take his place.

The rule never changed. Every King of the Wood died by the sword of the next. Strabo records the custom. Virgil connects the golden branch to the one Aeneas carried into the underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where the Sibyl tells him that no living man may enter the land of the dead without it.

The Grove

Two stories attached to the trees around the lake. The first concerned Virbius. Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses that Hippolytus, dragged to death by his own horses after Theseus cursed him, was brought back to life by Diana and Aesculapius. Diana hid him at Lake Nemi under a new name: Virbius, twice a man. Horses were forbidden in the sacred grove because horses had killed him the first time.

The second was Egeria's. After King Numa Pompilius died, the nymph who had been his counselor withdrew to the woods at Nemi and wept until Diana took pity and turned her into a spring. Ovid records the transformation in the Fasti. The spring flowed within the sanctuary grounds, and the priests used its water in Diana's rites.