Diana

Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt, of wild animals and wild places, of the woodland and, in time, of the moon. Her name is connected with the bright sky (dium), and her worship was old and Italian, but from early on she was identified with the Greek Artemis and absorbed that goddess's character as the virgin huntress, the mistress of beasts, and the protector, and bringer of danger, in childbirth. Like Artemis she was pictured with bow and quiver, a short tunic, and a hound or a stag, roaming the mountains by night, and later poetry made her a triple goddess, Diana on earth, Luna in the sky, Hecate in the underworld. Yet her Italian cults kept a distinct social colour that Artemis did not have, above all a strong association with the common people, with slaves, and with women.

Diana's grove-sanctuary at Lake Nemi kept an unusual priesthood recorded by several ancient writers: its priest, the rex Nemorensis, or King of the Wood, held office only so long as he could defend it, since any runaway slave who first broke a golden bough from a sacred tree in the grove earned the right to challenge the reigning priest to combat, killing him and taking the priesthood in his place, a violent rule of succession unique among Roman cults. This custom became the founding image of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, an enormously influential comparative study of myth and ritual that opens with the Nemi priesthood and reads it as a survival of a much older pattern of sacred kingship, a work that shaped the whole later academic study of religion and mythology.

Diana's great Roman temple stood on the Aventine Hill, traditionally founded by King Servius Tullius as a common sanctuary for the Latin League, and it kept a lasting character as a plebeian and popular shrine. Her festival, the Nemoralia, fell on the Ides of August (13 August), when worshippers, and especially women, came in torchlight processions, their hair wreathed, to give thanks and ask her aid; the day was also observed as a holiday for slaves. This link to the servile and the humble was one of Diana's marked traits at Rome, and the Aventine, the plebeian hill, was a fitting home for it. As a goddess who guarded women through the perils of childbirth she was also invoked under names shared with Juno Lucina, and her light, the moon, was read as a benign presence over the household and the fields.

Excavations at the Nemi sanctuary from the nineteenth century onward, including a large-scale dig sponsored by Lord Savile in the 1880s, recovered thousands of votive offerings left by ordinary worshippers, terracotta figurines of mothers and infants, model wombs and other body parts asking or thanking the goddess for healing and safe childbirth, alongside bronze mirrors and jewellery, giving Diana's cult at Nemi one of the richest surviving bodies of physical evidence for everyday Roman religious practice anywhere in Italy; many of these objects are now dispersed among museums including the British Museum and Nottingham Castle Museum, a legacy of nineteenth-century excavation practices that removed finds from Italy before modern archaeological standards took hold.

Diana's most famous and strangest cult was at Nemi, in the wooded crater by Aricia in the Alban Hills, where she was worshipped as Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Grove, beside a lake called the Mirror of Diana. Her priest there bore the title rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, and held office under a grim rule: he was a runaway slave who had won the post by killing his predecessor, and who could himself be challenged and killed by the next fugitive to break a bough from a sacred tree and defeat him in single combat. This dark succession fascinated the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, who took it as the starting point of The Golden Bough (1890), building on it a sweeping theory of the dying and reborn sacred king. Frazer's wider thesis is now treated with great caution, but the sanctuary at Nemi was real, richly furnished, and one of the most distinctive holy places of Roman Italy.