Venus Verticordia ("Changer of Hearts" or "Heart-Turner") was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus conceived as having the power to convert either virgin brides or sexually active women from dissolute desire (libido) to sexual virtue (pudicitia). Under this title, Venus was especially cultivated by married women, and on 1 April she was celebrated at the Veneralia festival with public bathing.
The epithet Verticordia derives from the Latin words verto, "turn", and cor, the heart as "the seat of subjective experience and wisdom". The conversion, however, was thought of as occurring in the mind – the mens or "ethical core". Women were thus viewed as having the moral agency necessary for shaping society, albeit in roles differing from men.
Venus Verticordia was one of several goddesses whose new or reinterpreted theology or cult practice was meant to inform the conduct of women as a response to wartime upheaval and social crisis during the Roman Republic. Romans differed from Near Eastern and many Mediterranean societies in their idealizing of monogamy and marriage for companionship, expressed in the status accorded to matronae (respectably married women), and in the more visible public roles played by women, who were encouraged to display their personal excellence. The "turning" or conversion of Venus Verticordia was not meant to suppress sexual desire but to encourage its positive expression in marriage, a purposing of its power for social benefit.
In Roman state religion The first Roman shrine (aedes) for any form of Venus had been built during the Third Samnite War in 295 BC. Located near the racetrack of the Circus Maximus and dedicated to Venus Obsequens ("Compliant" Venus), it was funded by fines imposed by the aediles on upper-class married women charged with sexual misconduct (stuprum). During the wars of the Middle Republic that expanded Rome's presence throughout the Mediterranean world, and especially during the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), social and economic power among Roman women of the propertied classes increased, as they stepped in to manage domestic matters in the absence of men deployed at war. At the same time, anxieties about untethered women led to regulation of their behaviors in relation to men through both legislation and religious cultivation, counterbalancing their contributions to the Roman state and relative autonomy on the home front with expectations of loyalty and self-discipline expressed sexually.
The cult of Venus Verticordia was established with the installation of a statue (simulacrum) around the time of the Second Punic War, before 204 BC, possibly 220 or 214 BC, or as early as 237 or 224 BC. A note in Pliny the Elder that the statue was dedicated before the importation of the Mother of the Gods in 204 BC establishes a terminus ad quem. A commission of ten men (decemviri) was appointed by the Roman Senate to consult with the Sibylline Books, but no ancient source specifies a precipitating event. Schilling thought it likely that the statue was dedicated after the founding of Venus Erycina's temple in 217 BC, whose "unwholesome influences" as a goddess of sexual commerce Verticordia may have been meant to counterbalance. A date of 215/214 BC might suggest that expiation was sought after the conviction and deaths of two Vestals who broke their vows around that time, following the disastrous Battle of Cannae the year before.
The official process behind the dedication was similar to the establishing of other women-centered cults such as that of Fortuna Muliebris at the beginning of the 5th century BC or the religious reparations owed to Juno Regina in 207 BC. A list was compiled of one hundred matronae – respectable married women – eligible to make the dedication, then their number was narrowed to ten by sortition (drawing lots). The ten women themselves nominated a Sulpicia, wife of a consul, as the most worthy of the honor among them. Pliny implies that it was the first time a woman was selected for a religious task on behalf of the state in this way, and says that this process was followed again in the selection of Claudia Quinta as the leading matron when the Magna Mater was brought to Rome in 204 BC.
The initial location of the founding statue is uncertain – generally, in the Vallis Murcia, between the northern slope of the Minor Aventine and the farther end of the Circus Maximus. It was possibly dedicated in the shrine of either Venus Obsequens or Erycina, or it may have been placed in an open-air precinct (templum) where Verticordia's shrine (aedes) was erected about a hundred years later.
Expansion of the cult The Temple of Venus Verticordia was one of several established by the Roman Republic in response to perceived outbreaks of female debauchery, in this instance incestum, the violation of religious chastity by three of the six women serving as "professionally chaste" Vestals. By the end of the 2nd century BC, overall Rome was on sound military footing, but a few defeats, one major, signaled instability and external threats to Rome's security, which the order of the Vestals was meant to embody. The Sibylline books were again consulted, and Verticordia's became the last of eight temples – dedicated to ten different deities, seven of them goddesses – that the Romans built in accordance with Sibylline authority. The earlier cult statue of Verticordia would have been moved there.
Work on the temple started in 114 BC. It was located in the Vallis Murcia, possibly near the shrine of Murcia at the Circus Maximus, but the proximity of functionally overlapping temples to Murcia and multiple Venuses in this area leaves uncertainties in interpreting the ancient texts. Coarelli assumed that the Temple of Venus Verticordia physically replaced that of the archaic Fortuna Virilis; the two deities shared a feast day. No traces of these buildings have been detected in the archaeological record at the site. Other than the annual feast day when the statue was bathed, nothing is known of the shrine's quotidian operations; since Verticordia was cultivated only by women, it seems likely that temple personnel included priestesses and female attendants.
Denarius of 46 BC
Since an identification by numismatists in the 19th century, a Republican denarius issued in 46 BC has sometimes been thought to depict Venus Verticordia on the reverse. The diademed figure holds a balance scale in her right hand and a sceptre in the left, with a small Cupid hovering at her shoulder. She wears a tunic and pallium (or palla). The Dioscuri appear on the obverse. The balance scale is a regular attribute of Aequitas ("Fair Measure"); the presence of Cupid marks the figure as a Venus.
Salomon Reinach thought it unlikely that the scale represented the power of Verticordia to bring balance to the passions, and considered it more generally to relate Venus to the zodiac sign of Libra, given the astrological preoccupations of the time, though in the late Republic Venus was more often associated with Taurus. While the cult of Verticordia is sometimes viewed as bringing equilibrium to the influence of Venus, countering her sexual force with the self-discipline of pudicitia, it may be a stretch to read the iconography of the coin as expressing that function.
The coin was issued by the moneyer Manius Cordius Rufus, and an identification as Verticordia is largely premised on an allusion to his family name, the gens Cordia. During this period, Julius Caesar was claiming Venus as his divine ancestor, and the goddess was prominent in his iconography under various cult titles, particularly Venus Genetrix, Venus as the mother of the Roman people. Although Verticordia expresses the more conservative values that Genetrix embodies, given that new instantiations of Venus were in vogue, no compelling reason emerges for Verticordia to have been revived at this time. Michael Crawford thought the figure of Venus more likely to be of the same type as the statue installed that year in the Temple of Venus Genetrix.
Founding narratives The narratives that explain the founding of Venus Verticordia's cult blend history and myth, as is characteristic of Roman mythology and its focus on human actions within a divine order that supports the Roman state. Ancient sources indicate that both the dedication of the statue and the building of the temple were religious responses during a time of military and social crisis.
Statue dedication
In the latter 3rd century BC, following a consultation with the Sibylline Books, it was determined that a statue of Venus Verticordia was required in response to the impudicitia of Roman matrons. Legislative concern about the immoderate behavior of matrons, or more precisely their ability to control wealth, was expressed around this time in the passage of the lex Oppia of 216 BC, a sumptuary law that sought to restrict the amount of gold a woman could own as well as the ways she could display her wealth. The wealth of women would have increased through inheritance as losses in war reduced the male population – thousands had died in the Battle of Cannae in a single day that year. At a time of prodigies and moral panic, as well as the diminished presence of men in everyday life, Roman women throughout this century were called on to participate more visibly in state religion, and doing so required them to move in relative freedom about the city, either in carriages or on foot accompanied by numerous attendants. Aemilia, the wife of Scipio Africanus, arguably Rome's greatest general in the Second Punic War, was transported in an ornate carriage and employed implements of gold and silver in carrying out women's rites.
This greater public role put stress on conservative Roman society that the Oppian limitations on modes of mobility and wealth, caused in part by displays of religious piety, were meant to confine to the purpose of religious cultivation. The Oppian law was related to other extraordinary efforts in 216 BC toward restraining women who had been engaged in war protests and demonstrations in the Forum Romanum following Cannae. When Cato the Elder argued twenty years later against repealing the lex Oppia, he railed that women being given free rein to ride horses or drive carriages was a perversion, since the ungovernable nature of women required them to submit to the yoke of customs and laws even when they thought them unjust. His argument failed on the grounds that women were part of Rome's progress toward civilization, and the law was repealed.
The statue of Venus Verticordia was perhaps intended "to rebuke women who had formed 'irregular liaisons'" when their husbands or other men who held guardianship (tutela) over them were away at war. From a list of one hundred matrons, presumably of senatorial rank, who were religiously and morally eligible to dedicate the statue, ten were chosen by lot. After some sort of "real virtue contest" among the ten finalists, the women themselves chose Sulpicia for the honor.
Sulpicia is most likely historical, though she became a legendary figure. Valerius Maximus says that she was the daughter of a Paterculus and the wife of a Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, presumably the consul of 237 BC. She is described in superlatives as sanctissima ("most holy"), elevated above all others in castitas ("purity", both religious and sexual), and pudicissima, of utmost sexual integrity. The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann imagined Sulpicia herself as the model for the statue, since she embodied the desired virtues.
Prodigy of the temple