Silvanus- Roman GodDeity"Silvanus Domesticus"

Cato's Offering

Cato described the ritual plainly. For the health of cattle, a farmer was to make an offering to Silvanus in the forest: three pounds of wheat meal, four and a half pounds of lard, four and a half pounds of meat, and three pints of wine. The offering went on the ground, not on an altar. The man who made it ate there in the woods, and no woman could attend or watch.

Silvanus belonged to the wild margin. His name comes from "silva," forest, and his domain was the edge where farmland met trees. Romans who worked land that bordered woodland knew that the forest was always trying to take back what had been cleared. Silvanus lived at that border. A pruning knife was his attribute, and a cypress was his tree.

No Temple

Silvanus had no temple in Rome. His worship happened outdoors, in groves, at boundary markers, in the places he inhabited. Farmhouse shrines held his image alongside the Lares and Penates, but the city was not his ground.

Three aspects divided his protection. Silvanus domesticus guarded the house. Silvanus agrestis guarded the fields and flocks. Silvanus orientalis guarded the boundary of the estate. A single god, split three ways, covering everything from the threshold to the tree line. Virgil placed him among the old Italian gods who watched over farmers and their land.

At the Frontier

Soldiers carved more dedications to Silvanus than to almost any other god. The inscriptions have turned up from Britain to the Danube to North Africa, scratched on stone altars at the edges of the empire. The men who raised them were often rural conscripts posted to frontier forts, patrolling the line where Roman roads ended and foreign territory began. Silvanus was the god of that line. He had always been the god of where things stopped being familiar.