GIANUS (Ianus). - An ancient Roman god. Although his name does not appear in the most ancient Roman calendar, it is proven that the festival of January 9, marked by the term Agon(ium), was celebrated in his honor. This is the first festival of the solar year, just as January (Ianuarius) is the first month. This primal position, by which it could be said: “pens Iovem summa, penes Ianum prima,” is confirmed by other facts: all sacrifices and prayers had to begin with an invocation to G. (and end with another to Vesta).
The first day of every month is also sacred to G.: together with Juno, goddess of the Kalends, as the day of the new moon, he receives a monthly sacrifice; in this connection he is also called Ianus Iunonius. G. is therefore a “principium deorum,” the first of the gods, “god of the gods” and “good creator” (dionus cerus) as he was invoked in the ancient carmen of the Salii. In Roman myth, this character is expressed in his role as the “first king” of Latium. Even the rex sacrorum, who may be considered his particular priest—it is he who offers a ram to the god on the day of the Agonium—is first in the hierarchical order of Roman priests. On the earliest Roman coins (4th century B.C.), the as, the unit of currency, bears the effigy of the god: a two-faced image that is peculiar to him at all times. This singular type of representation, which finds parallels among solar deities of other peoples, together with other elements (the festival, the victim, etc.), sheds light on the solar nature of the god, intuited even by ancient exegetes and perhaps also confirmed by the etymology of his name: today, in fact, the supposed derivation from the concrete term ianus, ianus (arch, door) is being abandoned, and without reviving, however, the implausible thesis of a
GIANNO, PIETRO - Portrait from an engraving by J. F. Sedelmier.
Gianno, Pietro - After brief and fortunate stays in Venice, Modena, and Milan, he went to Geneva in 1735, where he resisted the lures of conversion to Calvinism. Having long been opposed by the Roman Curia for his ideas and plans, the prime minister of the King of Sardinia sought to curry favor with the latter by having him imprisoned. Indeed, lured by means of an emissary to a place near Geneva but under Savoyard jurisdiction, he was arrested there and then taken to prison in Chambéry and to the castle of Miolans (April 1736). He remained there until the following year, as the Savoyard authorities refused to hand him over to the Roman Chancellery, which had requested him (though the papers of G. were sent to Rome). Transferred to Turin, he signed, overcome by threats and blandishments, an act of abjuration of his former ideas (March 1738). From Turin he was sent to the prison of Ceva, where he remained until 1744, occupied in writing new historical works, in which, despite some professions of Catholic faith, the old polemical motifs recur. Brought back to Turin, he died in the prison of the citadel.
G., in his major and minor works, in his initial sensism, his jurisdictionalism, and even his Socinianism, is to be regarded as one of the writers who made an effective contribution to the affirmation of lay positions in the 18th century.