Picus’s Family Tree

About Picus →

Family

• Canens(spouse)— Marriage

  Picus, king of Laurentum, married the nymph Canens, daughter of Janus, whose voice could charm stones and still rivers. His devotion to her was so absolute that he spurned Circe's advances, provoking the sorceress to transform him into a woodpecker.

• Faunus(child)

  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.

• Saturn(parent)

  Saturn fathered Picus during his reign in Latium, establishing a lineage that connected the Golden Age god to Rome's legendary kings through Picus's descendants Faunus and Latinus.

Rules over

• Latium

  Picus reigned as the first king of Latium, ruling from Laurentum in the age before Faunus and Latinus, when the land still remembered Saturn's Golden Age.

Associated with

• Circe(Greek)

  Circe desired Picus when she found him hunting alone in the Laurentine woods, but the king rebuffed her, declaring his love for Canens. Enraged, Circe struck him with her wand and turned him into a woodpecker, then transformed his searching companions into wild beasts.

• Remus

  A woodpecker sacred to Picus brought food to the infant Remus and his twin Romulus alongside the she-wolf's milk, as both creatures of Mars watched over his sons.