Vertumnus An ancient Italian god, of the seasons and their produce. Bk XIV:623-697. He sets out to woo Pomona, in disguise. Bk XIV:698-771. He reveals his true form, and wins her. Vesta The daughter of Saturn. The goddess of fire. The ‘shining one.’ Every hearth had its Vesta, and she presided over the preparation of meals and was offered first food and drink. Her priestesses were the Vestal Virgins. Her chief festival was the Vestalia in June. The Virgins took a strict vow of chastity and served for thirty years. They enjoyed enormous prestige, and were preceded by a lictor when in public. Breaking of their vow resulted in whipping and death. There were twenty recorded instances in eleven centuries. Bk XV:622-745. A name for the Tauric Diana at Nemi. Bk XV:745-842. She ‘married’ her high priest the ‘king of Rome’, e.g. Julius Caesar. See Fraser’s ‘The Golden Bough’ Ch1 et seq. Bk XV:843-870. She is worshipped with her brother Phoebus, and is set among Caesar’s ancestral gods. Virbius The name for the deified Hippolytus in Italy. He was the King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis) at Nemi, near Aricia. He was Diana’s consort, and a minor deity with Egeria. Bk XV:479-546. Volturnus A river, the modern Volturno, in Campania that runs by the site of ancient Capua. Bk XV:622-745. Vulcan, Mulciber Son of Juno. The blacksmith of the gods, father of Erichthonius. His home is on Lemnos. Bk II:752-786. Bk IV:167-189. He catches his adulterous wife Venus in a net. Bk VII:100-158. Creator of the bronze-footed bulls of King Aeetes. Bk VII:425-452. Periphetes the cripple was his son by Anticleia. he owned a huge bronze club with which he killed passers by. Theseus defeated him. Bk IX:211-272. The god of fire. Hercules on his funeral pyre is subject to it only in his mortal part, owed to his mother Alcmene. Bk XII:579-628. He made for Thetis, the armour of Achilles, and his fire is the flame of Achilles’s funeral pyre. Bk XIII:1-122. Lemnos is his island. § Xanthus, Scamander A river of Troy in Asia Minor and the river-god. His brother and companion river is the Simoïs. (See Homer’s Iliad). He is a son of Zeus. In the Iliad Achilles drives the Trojans into a bend of the river ‘as though a swarm of locusts driven into the river by a raging fire, clustered in the water to escape the flames’ and slaughters them till Scamander runs red with blood. Bk II:227-271 |
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