Juturna

← Encyclopedia

Juturna — in Latin Iuturna — was the Roman goddess of springs, fountains, and running water, a deity of the sweet water on which a city in a dry country depended. Her name was attached above all to one place: the Lacus Iuturnae, a spring-fed basin in the Roman Forum beside the temple of Castor and Pollux, whose waters were drawn for sacrifices and held to heal. Where most Roman water cult was diffuse, spread across countless local springs and nymphs, Juturna had a fixed civic address at the heart of the state.

The legend that grew up around her pool tied her to the founding battles of the Republic. After the Battle of Lake Regillus, the story went, the Dioscuri — Castor and Pollux — appeared in the Forum to announce Rome’s victory and watered their horses at Juturna’s spring; the adjacent temple commemorated the apparition. A separate temple to Juturna stood in the Campus Martius, traditionally credited to a victorious commander of the First Punic War, and her festival, the Iuturnalia, fell on the eleventh of January, observed especially by those whose trades worked with water. What the cult held, in its own terms, was simple and practical: the spring was a goddess, and the goddess kept the water good.

Her fullest portrait is literary rather than ritual, and it darkens the figure considerably. In the twelfth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Juturna is the sister of Turnus, the Italian prince fated to fall before Aeneas; the poet makes her a nymph raised to immortality by Jupiter as recompense for her lost maidenhood. Through the final battle she intervenes again and again to keep her brother alive — taking a charioteer’s shape, snatching him from danger — until Jupiter sends a portent to forbid it. Her closing lament, that she has been given an immortality she now experiences only as the inability to die with the brother she loves, is among the bleakest passages in the poem. How much of this Virgil inherited and how much he shaped is uncertain; the spring-goddess of the Forum and the grieving sister of the epic may have been joined by the poet himself.

Later antiquarians kept her memory in the technical record. Varro derived her name from iuvare, to help, fitting a goddess of healing waters; Ovid’s Fasti and the commentator Servius preserve fragments of her story and her rites. Modern scholarship treats her as a genuine and old Italic water deity whose mythology was thickened, and perhaps partly invented, in the literary tradition — the usual fate of the smaller Roman gods, who survive less in their own cult than in the poems that found a use for them. The pool in the Forum can still be seen. The water that made it sacred has long since stopped flowing.

→ Related: Faunus · Pax · Liber · Glaucus