The Volcanal, Ostia, and Reception

One of the oldest shrines of Rome was the Volcanal, an open-air altar precinct at the foot of the Capitol on the edge of the Forum, remembered as a cult-place from the time of the kings and used for public business as well as sacrifice. At Rome's harbour city of Ostia, Vulcan was the chief deity of the community, served by a college of priests headed by a pontifex Volcani who oversaw the town's cults, a reminder of how a god of the forge and the fire could stand as the patron of an entire city. Through his identification with Hephaestus, Vulcan supplied European art and language with the enduring image of the divine smith labouring at a subterranean forge, and his name survives in the very word volcano, the fire-mountain named for the god of fire.

Vulcan is regularly shown in art with a workman's conical cap, the pileus, and hammer and tongs at an anvil, the standard Roman visual shorthand for the smith-god shared with his Greek counterpart Hephaestus. Pliny the Elder records an odd piece of temple lore, that a dog kept to guard offerings at a shrine of Vulcan would bark at strangers who rarely visited but stayed silent for a frequent thief, an anecdote he uses to illustrate the limits of even a trained animal's vigilance rather than any special property of the god, but one that shows how thoroughly small stories accumulated around even a minor Roman cult site.