Vertumnus

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Vertumnus — also written Vortumnus — was the Roman god of seasonal change, of the turning year and the ripening of orchard and field. His province was transformation itself: the green fruit reddening, the season sliding into the next. Romans of the late Republic linked his name to the verb vertere, “to turn,” and that etymology, whether or not it is the true one, fixed his character for posterity as the god who changes and makes change.

The deeper origin appears to be Etruscan. Ancient writers report that Vertumnus came to Rome from Etruria, and modern scholarship has generally connected him to Voltumna, the chief god of the Etruscan league whose sanctuary, the fanum Voltumnae, served as the meeting place of the Etruscan cities. How close that identification really is remains debated; the linguistic and cultic links are suggestive rather than secure. His standing cult-site in Rome was a bronze statue in the Vicus Tuscus, the “Etruscan street” below the Forum, a location that itself advertised the foreign pedigree. A festival, the Vortumnalia, fell in mid-August, at the season of fruit and the autumn turn.

His fame is chiefly literary. Propertius gives the statue a first-person monologue in which the god runs through the disguises he can assume — reaper, soldier, fisherman, vintner — playing on his power to take any shape. Ovid, in the fourteenth book of the Metamorphoses, made the definitive story: Vertumnus loves Pomona, the goddess of cultivated fruit who wants nothing to do with suitors, and approaches her in form after form — harvester, vine-dresser, soldier, at last an old woman who pleads his own case to her face. The disguise is the courtship. When he finally drops it and stands revealed as the young god, she yields. The tale is Ovid’s own elaboration rather than old cult-lore, and it has done more than any rite to keep the name alive.

For the Romans themselves Vertumnus was a working deity of growth and trade as much as a figure of myth — invoked over gardens, produce, and the commerce of the market, his statue garlanded with the season’s first fruits. Later ages read him allegorically: a personification of the year’s mutability, and a ready emblem for the painters and poets who wanted a face for change. The sixteenth-century artist Arcimboldo composed a portrait of the Emperor Rudolf II out of heaped fruit and vegetables and titled it Vertumnus, turning the god of the ripening seasons into a literal still-life of a man. The deity of turning had, by then, become a way of picturing how all things turn.

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