Everything about Egeria Mythology totally explained
Egeria was a water
nymph in
Roman mythology. She was most famously the second wife and counselor of the second king of Rome,
Numa Pompilius.
Her name is used as an
eponym for a
woman advisor or
counselor.
Function
Egeria gave wisdom and prophecy in return for simple libations of water or milk at her
sacred grove, near where the
Baths of Caracalla were erected in the third century CE. The name
Egeria may derive from
"of the black poplar". Egeria was associated by Romans with
Diana, and women in childbirth called for her aid, so she appears to have presided over childbirth as well, like the
Greek goddess
Ilithyia, whose functions Artemis/Diana assumed.
Egeria was later categorized by the Romans as one of the
Camenae, minor deities who came to be equated with the
Greek Muses as
Rome fell under the cultural
hegemony of Greece; so
Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed Egeria among the Muses (ii. 6o).
At Aricia
Egeria may predate Roman myth: she could have been of
Italic origin in the sacred forest of
Aricia in
Latium, her immemorial site, which was equally the grove of
Diana Nemorensis ("Diana of
Nemi"). At Aricia there was also a Manius Egerius, a male counterpart of Egeria.
Because she was a nymph consort to the
Sabine Numa Pompilius, legendary second
king of Rome, she became associated with Rome. Juvenal expresses Roman legend in reporting that
Numa Pompilius met her in her sacred grove, where she taught him to be a wise and just king (
Livy i. 19); from Egeria Numa received the principles of the Roman religious constitution, a tradition that was coming under critical review in Juvenal's day. When Numa died, Egeria changed into a well.
At Rome
A grove sacred to Egeria in connection with Numa stood close by a busy gate of Rome, the
Porta Capena. In the second century, when
Herodes Atticus recast an inherited
villa nearby as a great landscaped estate, the natural
grotto was formalized as an arched interior with an
apsidal end (
illustration, above) where a statue of Egeria once stood in a niche; the surfaces were enriched with revetments of green and white
marble facings and green
porphyry flooring and friezes of
mosaic. The primeval spring, one of dozens of springs that flow into the river Almone, was made to feed large pools one of which was known as
Lacus Salutaris the "Lake of Health". (Juvenal,
Satire III.17–20) regretted an earlier phase of architectural elaboration:
» Nymph of the Spring! More honour’d hadst thou been,
If, free from art, an edge of living green, » Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed alone,
And marble ne’er profaned the native stone. (translated by William Gifford)
The
ninfeo was a favored picnic spot for nineteenth-century Romans and is still visitable in the archaeological
park of the Caffarella, between the
Appian Way and the even more ancient
Via Latina.
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