Fauna

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Fauna is a minor figure of Roman religion, named in antiquarian sources as the female counterpart of Faunus — wife, sister, or daughter, depending on the teller — and most often folded together with the goddess worshipped as Bona Dea, the “Good Goddess.” She belongs to the old stratum of Italian rural numina, the powers of field and forest from which Faunus himself emerges, and she is rarely encountered apart from that pairing. The pairing is itself the clue to her nature. Where Faunus is the voice of the wild — the speaker in the night woods, the prophet whose words come out of the darkness of a grove — Fauna stands as his answering half, the female face of the same diffuse power over flock and field, growth and the secret fertility of the land.

A power before a person

The numina of early Latium were not, in the first instance, persons. They were felt presences attached to actions and places: the power that quickens a seed, the power in a boundary stone, the power that speaks in a wood. Faunus is one of the clearest survivals of that older mode of religion — a force named for what it does (the etymology was already disputed in antiquity, drawn variously from favere, to favor, and fari, to speak) rather than a sharply drawn mythological character. Fauna belongs to the same archaic layer. She is paired with Faunus the way the Romans habitually doubled a power into a male and a female form, so that a single domain of life might be addressed under either name. Such couplings run through the Italic countryside: the woodland and prophetic Faunus shadowing the Greek goat-god Pan, with whom the Romans equated him; the field-and-orchard powers grouped around Vertumnus and the harvest numen Consus; the year-spirit Anna Perenna presiding over its turning; the older Latin king-bird Picus standing in the same genealogies. These are not gods with full biographies but presences that acquired names, stories, and statues only as Roman religion grew literary and began to organize its own past. Their kinships and genealogies — Fauna wife or sister or daughter of Faunus, Faunus son of Picus, Picus son of Saturn — are not remembered descent but classification: a way of arranging an inherited tangle of field-powers into a family tree, fixing in narrative an order the cult itself never possessed.

What that means for Fauna is precise. She is less a coherent deity than a name around which several stories cluster, and the stories arrive late — assembled by the antiquarian scholars who, from the first century before the common era onward, set themselves to recover and systematize the religion of their ancestors. The name is old; the dossier attached to it is the work of learned men reading backward.

The chain of report

Three writers carry her into the record, each at one remove from the last. Varro, the great encyclopedist of the late Republic whose treatise on divine matters is itself lost, is the ultimate source from whom the others draw. After him the grammarian and antiquarian Macrobius, compiling his learned dialogue on Roman lore long after the cult was a living thing, and the Christian apologist Lactantius, turning the same antiquarian material to polemical use. Their convergence is the whole of the evidence, and it points one way: the goddess publicly worshipped as Bona Dea was, they report, in truth Fauna, her real name kept from speech because no man might learn the secrets of her rites or so much as enter where they were performed.

Macrobius preserves the fullest version. Citing the antiquarian Cornelius Labeo and the books of the pontiffs, he reports that a temple was dedicated to Maia under the title Bona Dea, and that one and the same goddess was invoked in the priestly books as Bona, Fauna, Ops, and Fatua. Each name he glosses with an etymology: she is called Bona, the Good, because she is the source of all that sustains life; Fauna because she favors and nourishes everything useful to living creatures; Ops because life leans on her help; Fatua from speaking, since the newborn does not utter a sound until it has touched the earth. The glosses tell their own story. They are the moves of a scholar assembling a single divine identity out of a scatter of cult-titles, deriving each title from a Latin verb and binding the bundle together under one figure.

Lactantius, who names Varro as his authority, tells it as a life. He calls her Fenta Fauna — Fenta Fatua in some reports — and makes her at once the wife and the sister of Faunus, a doubling that betrays how loosely the kinship was held. In his hands the etiology hardens into biography: Faunus set his wife and sister among the gods after her death and named her the Good Goddess. For Lactantius the point is corrosive. If the most secret and venerated of Roman goddesses is only a deified mortal woman, a king’s drunk and murdered wife dressed up as a deity, then the whole edifice of pagan worship rests on the remembrance of human beings — which is exactly the argument his apology means to press. The same material that the antiquarians gathered to honor the gods’ antiquity, he turns into evidence against their divinity.

Two myths and what they explain

Two stories cluster around the name, and each is built to account for a feature of the Bona Dea rite rather than to narrate a goddess held in her own right.

In the first, Fauna is the chaste and exemplary wife of Faunus, so modest that no man but her husband ever saw or heard her. She comes upon a jar of wine, drinks until she is drunk, and Faunus, finding her so, beats her to death with rods of myrtle — then, stricken with remorse, raises her to the rank of a goddess. The story exists to explain two ritual facts at once. Wine was present at the rite of the Good Goddess and yet forbidden to be named: it was carried in under the word for milk, the jar that held it called a honey-vessel, so that the substance was used while the word was banished. And myrtle, sacred elsewhere to love and to Venus, was excluded from her precinct, the one plant her worshippers might not bring. The myth ties both anomalies to a single scene — the wine that ruined her, the myrtle that killed her — so that the rite remembers, in what it admits and what it bars, the manner of her death. The treatment of wine is the sharpest of these traces. Roman religion otherwise embraced the vine: it had its own god in Liber, the Italic Liber Pater of wine and increase, whose festival the Romans kept with open license. The Good Goddess inverts that openness. Her women drank, but the drink wore a borrowed name, the vine that crowned her statue stood in deliberate tension with the word her worshippers might not say, and the very substance Liber’s cult celebrated aloud was here used in silence — present in the room, absent from speech.

In the second, she is Faunus’s daughter, and he conceives a desire for her. She refuses him through every persuasion; he plies her with wine and beats her with myrtle, and still she will not yield. Only when he changes himself into a serpent does he at last lie with her. This is the other ritual fact answered: serpents were kept and tended in the goddess’s temple, a living serpent coiled at the feet of her cult statue. The story explains the snakes as it explains the wine and the myrtle in the first — by reading each surviving element of the cult back into an episode of the goddess’s life. They are charter-myths in the strict sense: narratives that exist to legitimate and account for what the rite already does.

The rite that was real

Behind the etiologies lay an actual and important cult, and it is the cult, not the goddess’s legend, that was the substantial reality of her worship. The full treatment of those rites belongs with Bona Dea; what matters for Fauna is the relation between the two names. The worship of the Good Goddess was conducted by women alone. Its most famous occasion was the December ceremony held each year in the house of a senior magistrate — a consul or a praetor — staged not by him but by his wife, with the Vestal Virgins in attendance, and with every male presence, down to images of men and male animals, removed from the house. It was this rite that Publius Clodius Pulcher profaned in 62 before the common era by stealing into the house of Julius Caesar in a woman’s dress, a scandal that broke open Caesar’s marriage and convulsed Roman politics for a year. The secrecy was the point. The goddess’s true name was not to pass a man’s lips, and it is into that silence that the antiquarians inserted “Fauna.”

Whether the women who kept the rite ever called their goddess Fauna is another question, and the honest answer is that nothing shows they did. The equation is the achievement of the learned tradition — Varro reaching for an origin, Macrobius for an etymology, Lactantius for a weapon — and not a fact recoverable from the cult itself. Modern scholarship reads it as their interpretation rather than as attested practice. T. P. Wiseman, weighing the rustic numina in his study of early Roman myth, treats the Fauna–Bona Dea identity as precisely this kind of antiquarian construction: a name supplied to fill a deliberate ritual silence, an etymology built to look like a genealogy. The goddess of the December rite kept her name unspoken; “Fauna” is the name the scholars spoke in her place.

Scholarship and the textual record

The whole of Fauna’s evidence is a short chain of late texts, and the modern literature works by reading that chain critically rather than by adding new witnesses.

The primary reports are two. Macrobius sets out the etymologies of Bona, Fauna, Ops, and Fatua, the citation of Cornelius Labeo and the pontifical books, and the cult details of the vine-leaf garland, the serpent, and the wine renamed as milk, in his Saturnalia, Book 1, chapter 12; the standard modern text and translation is Robert A. Kaster’s three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition (Harvard University Press, 2011), with the relevant passage at Saturnalia 1.12. Lactantius gives the deified-mortal version, on Varro’s authority, in the Divine Institutes, Book 1, chapter 22, available in the nineteenth-century Ante-Nicene Fathers translation at New Advent. Behind both stands Varro’s lost Antiquitates rerum divinarum, reconstructed from quotations by Burkhart Cardauns (Wiesbaden, 1976), which is how the modern reader meets Varro on the Italic numina at all.

For the figure in her context, the indispensable modern study of the Bona Dea cult is H. H. J. Brouwer’s Bona Dea: The Sources and a Description of the Cult (Brill, 1989), which assembles every ancient testimonium and inscription and weighs the Fauna identification against the epigraphic record. T. P. Wiseman’s Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1995) places Faunus, Fauna, and their kin within the wider scholarly account of how late-Republican antiquarians manufactured a mythology for Rome’s archaic gods — the frame that makes sense of why Fauna’s dossier is so much younger than her name.

The lexical afterlife is documented to the year. The pairing of the woodland deities’ names as scientific labels begins with Carl Linnaeus, who titled his catalog of Swedish plants Flora Suecica in 1745 and its companion volume on Swedish animals Fauna Suecica in 1746 — the latter digitized by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. From Linnaeus the convention spread; “fauna” entered English by about 1771, in the usage of the parson-naturalist Gilbert White and his contemporaries, to mean the whole animal life of a region, set against “flora” for its plant life. The goddess Flora, a far better-attested Roman deity of bloom and increase, supplied the partner term, and the rustic Fauna and her consort the animal one. It is a coinage with no ancient warrant — no Roman ever used fauna for a region’s beasts — built by eighteenth-century naturalists who took the woodland powers as convenient and faintly poetic names for the two kingdoms of the living world.

The name kept and the name spoken

Two names sit one inside the other. There is the name the December rite refused to utter — the true name of the Good Goddess, withheld from every man, guarded inside a house swept clean of all things male, the secret that Clodius violated and that the cult never gave up. And there is “Fauna,” the name the learned spoke into that gap: drawn from Faunus by the logic of pairing, glossed from favere by the logic of etymology, fitted with a wine-jar and a myrtle rod and a serpent so that each fact of the rite should have its story. The wine in the honey-vessel was poured and not named; the goddess of December was honored and not named. Where her own worshippers kept that silence, the antiquarians could not — and so the female of the woods received, from men who were forbidden her rites, the one thing those rites had been built to deny her: a name said aloud.

→ Related: Picus · Vertumnus · Anna Perenna · Consus · Salus · Faunus · Bona Dea · Lactantius · Flora · Liber · Pan