VEDIOVE

VEDIOVE. — God of the ancient Roman religion. The festival marked on 21 May in the archaic calendar with the single word Agoniun is shown (by later calendar annotations) to be sacred to V.
The position of this festival, between the Lemuria and the Carnaria, would already shed light on the infernal nature of the god, even if this were not evident from other facts: the god’s name implies a negative reference to Jupiter (ve-iotis, like ve-sanus, ve-cors); the god is invoked together with the Manes gods. At Rome he had a temple on the Tiber Island (festival: 19 January) and another on the Capitoline “between two groves” (festival: 7 March). His cult image represented him as a youth holding a bow—thus resembling Apollo—but with a goat at his feet. The gentile cult of the gens Iulia was dedicated to V., a fact that does not seem unrelated to the Augustan cult of Apollo.