Diana

DIANA. - Goddess of the ancient Roman and Italic religion. A large number of scholars hold that she is an originally Italic divinity who only under Greek influence was assimilated to Artemis; there are those who maintain that D. was from the very beginning nothing other than the Greek goddess received into Italy. In the public cult of Apollo D. already has a part in the 5th century B.C.; however, her Italic cult also has particular features lacking any close analogy with the Greek cult of Artemis.

The name of the goddess is probably explained from a root carrying the meaning of "brightness" (div., Dius, Diviana).

She was worshipped above all in woods: her place of worship in the ager Tusculanus and that ad compitum Anagninum are called a lucus, that of the Mons Algidus and that of the Aricine valley a nemus, that of Tibur a silva.

Her most important cult seats outside Rome are: 1) Mount Tifata near Capua (on the site of the sanctuary there now stands S. Angelo in Formia); 2) the Aricine valley, with the Nemus Dianae and with the lake (at present that of Nemi) also called "speculum Dianae". While the remains of the Tifatan sanctuary indeed demonstrate its antiquity (down to the 6th century B.C.) but give only vague indications as to the character of the cult, tradition has preserved for us the exceedingly singular characteristics of the equally very ancient cult of Nemi. The minister of the cult was called rex Nemorensis and had to be a runaway slave who, in order to succeed to the office, had to kill the priest in charge in a ritual duel. In the sacred precinct of D. Nemorensis two other divinities were worshipped: Egeria, who was a goddess invoked by women in childbirth, and Virbius who, according to the myth, would have been the Hippolytus hidden by Artemis in Italy; of the cult of this god it is known only that horses were not to enter his precinct and that his cult image was not to be touched. The cult had a federal character for the Latin peoples. It cannot be decided with certainty whether such a character belonged to the cult from its very beginning or whether the cult pre-existed; nor is the position clear of the dictator Egerius Laevius and of the eight "peoples" that figure in the relevant fragment of Cato; but the existence of the political character is undeniable and is particularly significant, given that it will be found again also in the Roman cult of the goddess. The festival of D. Nemorensis fell on 13 Aug. (day of the full moon). The ex-votos of the sanctuary, which however for the most part go back only to imperial times, document various characteristics of the goddess: goddess of the hunt, lunar goddess, goddess of fertility.

In Rome, the name of D. does not figure in the most ancient calendar; tradition attributes the founding of her temple on the Aventine to Servius Tullius. The cult of the Aventine shows various analogies with that of Nemi: its festival is likewise on 13 Aug.; the cult has a federal character, the temple is "commune Latinorum", but under the aegis of Rome, as emerges particularly from the cult legend of the foundation; and if the figure of the rex Nemorensis is without parallel in Rome, not even here is the goddess without relations to slaves: her temple is an asylum for them and her festival is "servorum dies festus".

Politically the cult of the Aventine D. concentrates around itself the religious interests of the plebs. The cult image of the goddess was of the type of the Artemis of Ephesus and came, at least according to tradition, from the Greek colonists of Massilia. The women celebrated the festival of Aug. with particular care for their beauties and their hair. Besides the Aventine temple, whose antiquity is demonstrated also by the fact that its written law later served as a perennial model for the other temples, D. had other sanctuaries in Rome, of indefinable but undoubtedly ancient age: among these, that of the vicus Patricius exclusively reserved for women.

From the beginning of the Roman public cult of Apollo, D. appears conceived, according to the Greek mythological schema, as his sister. In the literary testimonies her complex archaic characteristics tend to disappear, behind the Hellenistic form of Artemis; only the goddess's relations with the hunt and those with the moon, pushed as far as identification, are accentuated. Beneath the literary varnish, however, the original complexity and importance of the divine figure continues to survive, as emerges from the various cases of "interpretatio romana" in the provincial religions (e.g., in Illyricum), in which the name of D. is given to great divinities who certainly are not reducible to the characteristics of a huntress and lunar goddess.

Angelo Brelich

DIANA IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

With D. the Vulgate renders in Acts 19:24, 27 ff., 34 ff., the Ἄρτεμις of the original text.

But between the Artemis of the Greeks and the D. of the Latins (identified as a result of syncretism) and the Ephesian Artemis, of whom the Acts speak to us, there are radical differences. The first is, for both Greeks and Latins, a typically virgin divinity, protectress of maidens and young brides; the second is a goddess of fertility and maternity, for men as well as for plants and animals. The one, a lunar goddess and goddess of the woods, is conceived as a virgin huntress, armed with bow and arrows with which she strikes down anyone who presumes to compete with her (the myth of Orion); the other is a divinity of a perfectly Asiatic type and rather monstrous, with a breast studded with many breasts (hence the epithet πολύμαστος, multimammia: St. Jerome, Praef. in Epist. ad Eph.: PL 26, 470), and the lower part of the body enclosed in a kind of sheath on which figures of animals were carved. Such would have been the simulacrum of Artemis venerated in the famous temple of Ephesus, which descended from heaven. It was a rough cylinder of wood, tapered at the bottom and painted black, perhaps an old fetish, to which parts of ivory and gold had been applied. The characteristics of the Ephesian Artemis bring her close to the Magna Mater (v. CIBELE) of Phrygia and to the Phoenician Astarte. The Greek colonizers would have given the ancient Asiatic divinity the name and the meaning of Artemis. In her cult sacred prostitution was widely practiced. Her temple at Ephesus (Artemision), one of the seven wonders of the world, was served by various orders of priests and priestesses. The latter had, for the duration of their office, to practice virginity: this probably subsequently to the syncretism by which the Ephesian goddess had been brought close to the virgin daughter of Jupiter and Latona. At the head of the cult were the μεγάλωξοι, originally eunuchs.

As also results from Acts 19, there was in Ephesus a whole industry that prospered in the shadow of Artemis: statuettes of the goddess, little temples that reproduced the Ephesian sanctuary, or niches with the simulacrum of the divinity inside, amulets of every kind, arcane writings (ephesia grammata), to which a magical power was attributed for the most varied necessities of life.

And it was the silversmiths, with Demetrius at their head in the guise of agitator, who rose up in tumult against Paul (Acts 19:23-41), whose preaching threatened to seriously harm the interests of the trade. The cry of the excited crowd μεγάλη ἡ Ἄρτεμις Ἐφεσίων contained the characteristic title of the goddess: the great Artemis; a kind of liturgical invocation.

The festivals (Artemisia, Ephesia, Oecumenia), overseen by the Asiarchs, which attracted to Ephesus many devotees and pleasure-seekers, took place in the month of Artemision (April-May). This was probably the occasion chosen by Demetrius for the uprising against the dangerous work of Paul, which, from Ephesus, radiated into other centers of Asia, with serious consequences for the market of objects sacred to Artemis.

Teodorico da Castel S. Pietro