Larunda- Roman SpiritSpirit · Nymph"The Silent One"
Also known as: Lara, Muta, and Tacita
Titles & Epithets
Domains
Description
Her tongue torn out for warning Juno of Jupiter's affairs, this nymph of the Almo walks forever mute toward the underworld. Mercury found her on that dark road and fathered the Lares, Rome's household guardians, on a goddess who could no longer cry out.
Mythology & Lore
The Talkative Nymph
Ovid tells Larunda's story in the Fasti (2.583-616), placed within his account of the Feralia, the festival honoring the dead in late February. Larunda was a naiad, daughter of the river god Almo, a small tributary of the Tiber. She was famous among the nymphs for her inability to keep secrets. When Jupiter pursued the nymph Juturna and enlisted the other water nymphs to prevent her escape, Larunda went to Juno instead and revealed her husband's designs.
Jupiter's punishment was swift and specific. He tore out her tongue, the very instrument of her defiance, and ordered Mercury to escort her to the underworld, where she would dwell among the shades as a mute spirit. After that she was called Muta, the mute, and Tacita, the silent. The nymph who could not stop speaking would never speak again.
Mother of the Lares
On the road to the underworld, Mercury was seized with desire for his charge. He lay with the tongueless nymph in a grove beside the path, and she conceived twin sons. These were the Lares, the guardian spirits whose small shrines stood at every Roman crossroads and in every Roman home.
Ovid places her story within the Feralia, and the rite he describes belongs to her. An old woman sat among a circle of younger women, pressed three grains of incense beneath a threshold, bound lead tablets with dark thread, and sewed shut the mouth of a fish head smeared with pitch. She invoked Tacita by name. The hostile tongues were bound. She left the house drunk on unmixed wine.