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Diana of the Aventine and the Goddess of Slaves

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Diana of the Aventine and the Goddess of Slaves

Diana's great Roman temple stood on the Aventine Hill, traditionally founded by King Servius Tullius as a common sanctuary for the Latin League, and it kept a lasting character as a plebeian and popular shrine. Her festival, the Nemoralia, fell on the Ides of August (13 August), when worshippers, and especially women, came in torchlight processions, their hair wreathed, to give thanks and ask her aid; the day was also observed as a holiday for slaves. This link to the servile and the humble was one of Diana's marked traits at Rome, and the Aventine, the plebeian hill, was a fitting home for it. As a goddess who guarded women through the perils of childbirth she was also invoked under names shared with Juno Lucina, and her light, the moon, was read as a benign presence over the household and the fields.

Excavations at the Nemi sanctuary from the nineteenth century onward, including a large-scale dig sponsored by Lord Savile in the 1880s, recovered thousands of votive offerings left by ordinary worshippers, terracotta figurines of mothers and infants, model wombs and other body parts asking or thanking the goddess for healing and safe childbirth, alongside bronze mirrors and jewellery, giving Diana's cult at Nemi one of the richest surviving bodies of physical evidence for everyday Roman religious practice anywhere in Italy; many of these objects are now dispersed among museums including the British Museum and Nottingham Castle Museum, a legacy of nineteenth-century excavation practices that removed finds from Italy before modern archaeological standards took hold.

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