Faunus

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Before the Olympians were carried into Italy on Greek ships and given marble houses in Rome, the land already had its powers, and they were not gods of the city. They belonged to the woods and the high pasture, to the boundary stones and the uncultivated ground where the herd strayed past the last plowed field. Faunus is among the oldest of them: a deity of the wild countryside — of forests, grazing land, and the increase of flocks — and the bearer of a voice that spoke unbidden out of the trees. He stands with the indigenous Italic powers, tied to the soil itself rather than to the temples of the state, and by the late Republic the Romans had firmly drawn him together with the Greek Pan, lending him the goat-legs, the horns, and the woodland haunts of that figure.

A presence in places

What the Latin sources describe is less a clearly drawn personality than a presence felt in particular places. Lucretius and others speak of the Fauni in the plural — the half-glimpsed spirits whose cries and reedy music country people heard in the hills after dark — and the name slides easily between the single god and a whole class of such beings, much as the Greek world held both Pan and the satyrs at once. The slippage is not a confusion to be cleared up; it is the shape of the thing. A power of the wild edge is not one figure standing in one grove but the wildness itself, audible now here, now there, scattered across the same broken country where Pan’s panic could fall on a flock or a marching column without a visible cause. Faunus is the name the Latins gave that audible wildness, and the Fauni are the same power heard in the plural.

Of the kindred Roman powers of the margin he is the eldest and the most oracular. Silvanus, god of woods and uncultivated land and of the boundaries between holdings, shares his terrain and was worshiped privately at the same edges; Picus, the woodpecker-god and augural king, is set in the genealogies as his father; Pan is the Greek mask laid over the whole Italic face. The herdsman’s protector who taught the keeping of bees and flocks, Aristaeus, belongs to the same pastoral world from the Greek side. Faunus is the indigenous center of that cluster — the one the others gather around.

The voice in the grove

Faunus was credited above all with a particular kind of speech. The Fauni were heard as voices in the woods; the god himself was approached as an oracle, and the manner of approach was incubation. The supplicant came to a consecrated place, sacrificed a sheep, lay down for the night on the spread fleece of the slain animal, and waited for an answer to arrive in sleep — a dream-prescription, a warning, a phantom seen, a voice heard in the dark. The fleece is the signature of the rite: the sleeper rests on the skin of the very victim offered to the god, so that the offering and the bed are one act. By the antiquarians’ reckoning the responses came in the old native meter, the Saturnian verse, the rhythm of a speech older than the imported Greek hexameter.

This places Faunus inside the wider apparatus of ancient incubation — the institution by which a suppliant slept in a holy place to receive, in a dream, a cure or an oracle from a god. Its great home was the cult of the healer Asklepios, whose sanctuaries at Epidaurus, Pergamon, Kos, and elsewhere drew pilgrims who underwent purification, made their offerings, and passed the night in a hall set aside for the god to come in sleep. The fullest first-person record of that experience anywhere in classical antiquity belongs to the Antonine orator Aelius Aristides, whose Hieroi Logoi — the Sacred Tales — narrate years of incubatory dreams at the Pergamene Asklepieion in voluble detail. Aristides is to the Greek healing cult what no one quite is to Faunus: a named voice from inside the dormitory. The Faunine oracle survives instead in scattered notices and in literary set-pieces, which is itself part of why some readers have wondered whether the god ever ran a formal dream-shrine at all, or whether his old reputation as a speaker and his later reputation as a creature of dreams were drawn together after the fact. The practice belongs, in any case, to the same family as the Asklepian incubation and to the broader Roman repertoire of divination and prophecy: the reading of sleep, of birds, of entrails, of the unbidden sound, as the speech of powers that do not otherwise hold conversation.

The oracle’s named seats lay where the wild pressed close to the settled. One was the grove of Tibur — Tivoli, in the hills above Rome — sacred to the prophetic spring of Albunea, where the water broke from the ground with a sulfurous breath and the wood ran down into the gorge of the Anio. There the consultant slept on the fleece and waited; there, in the legend the poets kept, the kings of Latium had gone before him. The same grove later attached itself to the Tiburtine Sibyl, herself called Albunea, so that the place held two voices of prophecy at once — the herd-god’s dream-answer and the seeress’s verse. Another oracle stood on the Aventine within Rome, the hill of the plebs and the unincorporated cults, fittingly the city’s own wild edge. The native cast of the whole institution shows in the meter: where the Greek oracles answered in hexameter, the Faunine voice spoke in Saturnians, the old Italian rhythm, the speech of the land answering in its own measure.

Where his counterpart Fauna fits — and whether she is his wife, his sister, or his daughter — the sources leave unsettled; the antiquarians themselves disagreed, and some of them folded Fauna into the veiled goddess of women whose name the cult kept secret, Bona Dea. That identification carries its own silences and is best left to her own account; the question of Faunus’s spouse is one the record does not close.

Many names of one power

Like the slide between the single god and the plural Fauni, the god answered to a cluster of names, each catching a different face of the same power. As Inuus he was the bringer of fertility to the herds, the force that made the flock conceive; as Lupercus, in his February guise, he was the keeper of the flock against the wolf, worshiped at the most archaic of Roman rites. The Lupercalia of the fifteenth of February — the running of the half-naked Luperci from the cave called the Lupercal, where the she-wolf was held to have suckled the city’s founders — was bound to Faunus in this wolf-warding aspect, a rite of purification and increase older than almost anything else on the Roman calendar. As Incubo or Fatuus he was the speaker of dreams and the foreteller of fate. The names do not divide him into separate gods; they are the angles from which a power of the wild margin was approached — the giver of increase, the warder of the herd, the voice in sleep — and the priests and antiquarians who listed them knew they were listing aspects, not rivals. The identification with Pan gathered the whole set under one Greek image: the goat-shape, the pipe, the high lonely country, the sudden terror, the fertility of the flock. What Pan was to Arcadia, Faunus and his many names were to Latium, and the late Republic let the two faces become, for most purposes, one.

The concrete cult

His place in Roman religion was not a literary abstraction but a matter of stone and calendar. He had a temple on the Tiber island, vowed by two aediles and dedicated in 194 BCE, sharing that midstream island with the great healing cult of Aesculapius — the Roman Asklepios — whose serpent had been ferried up the river in 293 BCE to end a plague. To raise the herd-god’s house on the same island as the imported healer set two kinds of answered prayer side by side: the dream-cure of the Greek physician-god and the dream-voice of the native power of the wild.

The Romans kept him an annual rural festival, the Faunalia. One observance fell on the fifth of December, when country people brought rustic offerings and gave themselves to dancing in the slack season after the harvest; another was attached to the Tiber-island temple in February. Horace fixes the December feast for good in an ode — the eighteenth of his third book — that pictures the god crossing the sunlit fields and the village at his ease, gentle to the young flocks, while the ox plays in the meadow, the wolf and the lamb keep an unspoken truce, and the laborer beats the hated ground with a triple step. It is one of the few moments where the unnerving power of the dark wood is shown at rest, in winter, on holiday among the people who feared him the rest of the year.

The Romans also wove Faunus into their legendary past. In the euhemerized genealogy he is an early king of Latium, son of Picus and grandson of Saturn — the deposed god who, exiled from heaven, had ruled Italy in its golden age — and father of Latinus, the king whose people gave their name to the Latins. So the line of the god of the wild runs straight into the founding house of the Latin nation. Virgil makes the most of it. In the Aeneid, when King Latinus is troubled by prodigies and must learn the destiny of his daughter, he goes to the oracle of his father Faunus in the deep grove beneath the spring of Albunea, lays a hundred sacrificed ewes’ fleeces on the ground, and sleeps; and out of the silent wood a voice tells him not to wed his daughter to a Latin, for foreigners are coming whose blood will lift the name of his house to the stars. The whole Roman future — the marriage of the Trojan Aeneas into the Latin line — is set in motion by the dream-voice of the herd-god speaking from his sacred grove. The oldest power of the Italian wild becomes, in the national epic, the one who directs the founding of the Roman race.

The reading of the god

The figure that survives across these sources is a consistent shape rather than a fixed story. Faunus is approached now as a single god, now as a swarm of woodland voices; he is protector of the flock and bringer of its increase, yet a thing to be feared in the dark; he is the most archaic of Italic powers and, by the late Republic, the wearer of a Greek goat-god’s face. He keeps the company of the other gods of the Italian margin and the vine — Liber, the native Italic god of wine and the wild fertility of the land, whom the Romans drew together with the Greek Dionysus as Faunus was drawn together with Pan; the Phrygian-Thracian Sabazius, another foreign power assimilated to Dionysus and to the ecstatic countryside; and, across the spring-fed island and grove, the water-nymph Juturna and the hearth-goddess Vesta of the settled center against which his wildness is measured. He is, in every notice, the god of the seam between the tilled and the untilled, the field and the forest, the daylight pasture and the voice that comes after dark.

Scholarship and the sources

The ancient witnesses are scattered but consistent. Varro reported that the Fauni were gods of the Latins who used to foretell future events in wooded places in Saturnian verse, deriving their name from fari, “to speak”; Servius, in his late commentary on Virgil, repeated the derivation and paired the god with the prophetic Fatua or Fauna, on the ground that they can foretell the future. The Tiber-island temple is recorded by Livy; the December festival by Horace’s third book of odes; the incubation at Albunea by Virgil’s seventh Aeneid. The standard older synthesis of these notices is the article in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, which gathers the oracle, the fleece-rite, the grove of Albunea and the Aventine, and the Saturnian responses; the modern reference treatment is the entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Virgil’s oracle scene can be read in the Latin and in translation at the Perseus Aeneid VII, where Latinus seeks his father’s voice on the strewn fleeces beneath Albunea.

On the name itself the scholarship divides along the same line the ancients drew. One derivation reads Faunus from a root for “favoring” — Proto-Italic forms behind a sense of the kindly or propitious power, the god who blesses the flock — and on this reading Georges Dumézil, in his Archaic Roman Religion (1970), rendered the name as the Favorable One, a euphemism for a power one would rather not provoke. The other derivation, the ancients’ own, reads it from fari, “to speak,” making him the Speaker, the god of the voice in the grove. Each etymology flatters a different side of the same figure: the one who gives increase, and the one who gives oracles. The two readings have never been reconciled, and the god is large enough to hold both — the favorable power and the speaking power, generous to the herd and audible in the dark.

Both halves of the contested etymology — the favoring power and the speaking power — name the same god: the one who makes the flocks increase and the one whose voice comes unbidden out of the trees. The December feast caught him exactly there, the wild power briefly at rest among the herds it guarded.

→ Related: Liber · Juturna · Pax · Sabazius · Pan · Silvanus · Picus · Saturn · Bona Dea · Aristaeus · Aelius Aristides · Incubation Pagan Christian · Prophecy · Divination · Dionysus