Picus

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A man is shown seated with the augur’s curved staff in his hand and the short bordered cloak across his shoulders, and a woodpecker is perched at his side, and the puzzle of him is that the name written under the figure is the name of the bird. Picus is a king of Latium and a creature of the woods at once, and the seam between the two is not a flaw in the record but the whole of what he is. He is a mortal ruler in the line that runs down to Rome, and he is a numinous bird whose tapping at the bark was read for the will of the gods. Where the king ends and the bird begins is a question the sources never close, and may never have meant to: he is Picus, and picus is the Latin word for the bird beside him.

The king in the line of Latium

In the genealogy the Romans gave their own beginnings, Picus stands near the head of the Latin king-list. He is a son of Saturn — the deposed sky-god who, exiled from heaven, was held to have ruled Italy in its golden age, when the sown field gave its increase without labor. He is the father of Faunus, the oracular god of the wild countryside, and through Faunus the grandfather of Latinus, the king who receives Aeneas and whose people give their name to the Latins. So the descent runs: the god of the sown earth, the woodpecker-king, the voice in the grove, and then the founding house of the Latin nation into which the Trojan line marries. Picus sits at the hinge where the gods of the old Italian land are being turned into the ancestors of a city — the euhemerizing reflex that takes a numen of the fields and gives him a throne, a reign, and a place in a dynasty.

Virgil fixes the figure in the seventh book of the Aeneid. When the Trojans reach Latium, their envoys are led into the vast ancestral palace of King Latinus at Laurentum, a hall raised on a hundred columns and held holy by its grove and by the worship of generations. It is named the palace of Picus, and along its vestibule stand the cedar images of the forefathers — Italus, father Sabinus who planted the vine, Saturn, and two-faced Janus — the painted and carved line of the kings from the beginning. Among them is Picus himself, the tamer of horses, holding the lituus, the augur’s crook-headed staff of office, wrapped in the trabea, the short purple-striped robe of the augural priesthood, the little sacred shield in his left hand — and at his side his wife Circe, who out of desire struck him with her golden rod and changed him by her drugs into a bird, sprinkling the colors across his wings. He is shown, that is, as a man caught in the act of becoming the creature whose name he carries: already half-transformed, the king and the woodpecker held in a single image on a single wall.

The Circe story

The fuller telling is Ovid’s. In the fourteenth book of the Metamorphoses the story is set in the deep woods of Latium, and the Picus of it is young, beautiful, a rider and a hunter, beloved of every wood-nymph of the Latian springs — and married for love to Canens, daughter of Janus, a singer whose name was given for her singing, who could draw the rocks and the wild beasts after her voice. Circe, gathering her herbs in the same wood, sees him riding to the boar-hunt in his purple cloak, and the sight takes her. She conjures a phantom boar that crosses his path and bolts into the densest thicket, and Picus, following it from his companions, dismounts among the trees where she waits. There she declares herself, and he refuses her: he belongs to Canens. Refused, the goddess of the wand turns on him. With her incantations spoken three times and three times again, and a touch of the rod, she makes of him the bird. His crimson cloak passes into the crimson of the woodpecker’s crown and nape; the golden brooch that pinned the cloak becomes the band of yellow that rings the bird’s neck; and where the king had stood a woodpecker beats its anger against the bark of the oaks. Canens searches six days and six nights along the Tiber, and on the bank at last sings herself away into thin air, leaving only her voice and the name of the place the Muses called for her.

In Ovid the change reads less as a sentence than as a disclosure — the drawing out of something the name had carried all along. The man named for the woodpecker becomes the woodpecker; the wand does not so much impose the shape as uncover it. This is the literary face of Picus, the polished Augustan set-piece, and it is the face later poetry and art kept: Circe with her cup and rod, the refused suitor, the bird flung up among the branches. But the bird had a standing in Italian religion that owed nothing to Circe and ran far older than the tale of her wand.

The woodpecker of Mars

The picus Martius, the woodpecker of Mars, was a real power in the Italic reading of birds. The augurs — the priests whose whole office was the watching of the sky for the consent or refusal of the gods — counted the woodpecker among the small body of significant birds whose flight and cry carried a message, and they reckoned it sacred to the war-god in particular. Plutarch, turning the matter over in his Roman Questions, asks why the Latins revere the woodpecker and will not eat it, and gives among his answers that it is sacred to Mars because it is, on his account, courageous and spirited with a beak strong enough to bore through the heart of an oak. The same passage preserves the other half of the bird’s standing: that Picus, changed by his wife’s drugs into the woodpecker, gives oracles and answers in that form to those who come to consult him — the bird, not merely the king, as a giver of prophecy. The antiquarian Festus drew the name and the office tight together, deriving Picus from the man’s habit of taking his auguries from a woodpecker: the king is named for the bird he reads, and the bird is named for nothing but itself.

The woodpecker stands beside the she-wolf in the city’s own foundation. In the strand of the legend Plutarch records, the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus were not suckled by the wolf alone; a woodpecker came again and again to the exposed infants and brought them scraps of food — both creatures of Mars, the wolf and the bird together, keeping alive the founders of the war-god’s city. And the bird is written into the migration-legends of central Italy. The Picentes, the people of Picenum on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, traced their name and their coming to a woodpecker sent by Mars to lead them. They were said to be of Sabine stock, sent out under the rite of the ver sacrum, the sacred spring — the vow by which a hard-pressed people dedicated to Mars the whole yield of one year, and when the dedicated generation came of age sent them out to found a settlement elsewhere, following whatever animal the god appointed as their guide. Where the Sabines were led by a bull and the Hirpini by a wolf, the Picentes followed the picus; their land took its name from the bird, and the Umbrian cognate peiqu keeps the same word. The bird as a guide sent by the god is the plainest possible form of the augural sign — the will of Mars made visible as a winged thing moving ahead of the people who must follow where it goes.

The reading of the figure

What the scholarship sees behind all of this is a faded deity. Picus reads as an old Italic power of the fields and of foretelling, bound to Mars and to the woodpecker, an agricultural and prophetic numen of the kind native to the peninsula before the Greek gods were carried in and given marble. The king and the bird-god are not two beings but one, drawn apart by the same habit that turned Saturn the golden-age god into Saturn the early Italian ruler and Faunus the voice in the woods into Faunus an ancestral king: a numen flattened into a name in the king-list, kept alive in the historical period as a character in poetry and a figure on a painted wall. The web of his kin marks the same archaic Italian ground — Faunus the oracular wild power set as his son, Fauna the prophetic female counterpart of that household, the shape-shifting orchard-god Vertumnus and the granary-god Consus of the same indigenous pantheon, with Saturn and the sky-father Jupiter overhead. On this reading the Greek Pan, the pastoral goat-god whose mask the Romans later laid over Faunus, belongs to the wider family of wild-country powers that the Latins recognized in their own woods — a cognate of mood and terrain, never the same figure, and never folded into Picus himself.

The Circe of the Metamorphoses is the latest layer, the Hellenizing overlay: a Greek enchantress out of the Odyssey, dwelling on her Italian cape, grafted onto a native Latin spirit to furnish him with a love-story and a transformation in the manner of Ovid’s other changes. Strip the enchantress away and what remains is a prophetic bird of the war-god and the priestly office that reads it — the matter that lives in divination, the watching of birds and entrails and the sky for the gods’ consent, and in prophecy, the speaking of what is to come; the augural system itself belongs to those accounts, and the long argument over what a figure like this is belongs to the study of mythology. What is certain is that the man and the bird were never separable. He bore the woodpecker’s name before any sorceress came near him, carried the augur’s staff that read the woodpecker’s flight, and sat among the painted kings with the bird already at his shoulder. When Circe’s wand falls in Ovid’s wood, it changes nothing of what he was; it only lets the shape long folded inside the name come open — the king turning into the bird he had always, in name and in office and in the old religion behind both, already been.

The sources and the scholarship

The figure survives in a handful of texts that the antiquarians and modern handbooks gather. The literary heart is Ovid’s account of Picus, Canens, and Circe in Metamorphoses XIV, readable in the public-domain translation hosted at Theoi; the visual tableau is Virgil’s, in the palace of the ancestral kings at Aeneid VII, where Picus sits with the lituus and the trabea and the woodpecker — given in the Latin and in translation in the Kline Aeneid VII. The religious witness is Plutarch’s, in the twenty-first of the Roman Questions, which preserves the bird’s sanctity to Mars, the oracle the woodpecker gives, and the woodpecker’s part in feeding the founder-twins; Festus supplies the etymology that ties the king’s name to his augural bird, and Strabo and Pliny carry the woodpecker-led migration of the Picentes under the ver sacrum. The older synthesis of these notices is the article in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, which gathers the genealogy, the Circe story, and the woodpecker’s place in the augural lore; the modern treatment of Picus as a faded field-and-prophecy deity, attached to Mars and split into king and bird, runs from Georg Wissowa’s Religion und Kultus der Römer through Georges Dumézil’s Archaic Roman Religion (1970), and the structure of Virgil’s genealogical wall-scene is examined in the Classical Quarterly study of Latinus’ genealogy and the palace of Picus.

→ Related: Vertumnus · Fauna · Consus · Saturn · Faunus · Mars · Jupiter · Divination · Prophecy · Mythology · Pan