Diana Nemorensis and the King of the Wood

Diana's most famous and strangest cult was at Nemi, in the wooded crater by Aricia in the Alban Hills, where she was worshipped as Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Grove, beside a lake called the Mirror of Diana. Her priest there bore the title rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, and held office under a grim rule: he was a runaway slave who had won the post by killing his predecessor, and who could himself be challenged and killed by the next fugitive to break a bough from a sacred tree and defeat him in single combat. This dark succession fascinated the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, who took it as the starting point of The Golden Bough (1890), building on it a sweeping theory of the dying and reborn sacred king. Frazer's wider thesis is now treated with great caution, but the sanctuary at Nemi was real, richly furnished, and one of the most distinctive holy places of Roman Italy.