Vulcan

Vulcan (Latin Volcanus) was the Roman god of fire, both the destructive fire that consumes cities and the useful fire of the smith's forge. His cult was ancient at Rome, ascribed by tradition to the earliest kings, and his name may be pre-Latin. Identified with the Greek Hephaestus, he took on that god's character as the divine craftsman, lame smith of the gods, maker of thunderbolts and armour, but his Roman worship kept its own strong focus on fire as a danger to be appeased and kept away. In myth he was reckoned a son of Jupiter and Juno and, in the Greek-derived stories, husband of Venus; older Italian tradition paired him with the fire-goddess Maia or Stata Mater, who checks fire. Where Hephaestus was chiefly the artisan, Vulcan was above all the power of the flame that must be honoured lest it destroy.

Etruscan religion, which shaped so much of early Roman cult, provides the clearest evidence for Vulcan's pre-Latin roots: the Etruscan smith-god Sethlans appears on engraved bronze mirrors and is named among the regions of the divine sky mapped on the Piacenza Liver, a bronze model used for liver-divination discovered in 1877, where he occupies a position in the northern, more ill-omened sector of the celestial scheme the Etruscan haruspices consulted. The identification of Sethlans with Vulcan, generally accepted by scholars of Etruscan religion, suggests that Rome's fire-god arrived, at least in part, through the same Etruscan channel that shaped so much of early Roman kingship and ritual.

Vulcan's festival, the Volcanalia, fell on 23 August, in the dry heat of late summer when the danger of fire in barns and harvest was greatest. Its rites reflect exactly that fear: bonfires were lit, and Romans threw small live fish, or, in some accounts, other small animals, into the flames, offering these creatures to the god as substitutes in the hope that he would spare human life and property from burning. Because his power was dangerous, Vulcan's temples were characteristically sited outside the sacred boundary (the pomerium) of the city and of settlements, keeping the fire-god, symbolically, beyond the walls. This deliberate placing on the margins is one of the clearest expressions in Roman religion of a god approached mainly to avert the harm he could do.

Vulcan's name had one more scientific life still to come. In the mid-nineteenth century the astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, fresh from his triumphant prediction of Neptune, proposed that an unseen planet, which he named Vulcan, orbited even closer to the sun than Mercury and explained a small, otherwise unaccounted-for irregularity in Mercury's orbit. Decades of searching produced no confirmed sighting, and the puzzle was finally resolved in 1915 when Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity accounted for Mercury's orbital anomaly without requiring any additional planet, quietly retiring the hypothetical world named for the Roman fire-god after some sixty years of intermittent astronomical hunting.

One of the oldest shrines of Rome was the Volcanal, an open-air altar precinct at the foot of the Capitol on the edge of the Forum, remembered as a cult-place from the time of the kings and used for public business as well as sacrifice. At Rome's harbour city of Ostia, Vulcan was the chief deity of the community, served by a college of priests headed by a pontifex Volcani who oversaw the town's cults, a reminder of how a god of the forge and the fire could stand as the patron of an entire city. Through his identification with Hephaestus, Vulcan supplied European art and language with the enduring image of the divine smith labouring at a subterranean forge, and his name survives in the very word volcano, the fire-mountain named for the god of fire.

Vulcan is regularly shown in art with a workman's conical cap, the pileus, and hammer and tongs at an anvil, the standard Roman visual shorthand for the smith-god shared with his Greek counterpart Hephaestus. Pliny the Elder records an odd piece of temple lore, that a dog kept to guard offerings at a shrine of Vulcan would bark at strangers who rarely visited but stayed silent for a frequent thief, an anecdote he uses to illustrate the limits of even a trained animal's vigilance rather than any special property of the god, but one that shows how thoroughly small stories accumulated around even a minor Roman cult site.