Vedoiove

VEDIOVE. - A god of ancient Roman religion. The festival marked on 21 May in the archaic calendar with the single word Agonium is shown (by later calendrical annotations) to have been sacred to V.
The position of this festival, midway between the Lemuria and the Carnaria, would already shed light on the god’s infernal character, even if this were not evident from other facts: the god’s name implies a negative reference to Jupiter (ve-Iovis, like ve-tanas, ve-cori); the god is invoked together with the di Manes. At Rome he had a temple on the Tiber Island (festival: 1 Jan.) and another on the Capitoline, «inter duos lucos» (festival: 7 March). His cult image represented him as a young man with a bow in his hand—thus resembling Apollo—but with a goat at his feet. The gentilician cult of the gens Iulia was devoted to V., a fact which does not seem unrelated to the Augustan cult of Apollo.