Venus Verticordia

Venus Verticordia ("Changer of Hearts"^[1] or "Heart-Turner"^[2]) was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus conceived as having the power to convert either virgins or sexually active women from dissolute desire (libido)^[3] to sexual virtue (pudicitia).^[4] Under this title, Venus was especially cultivated by married women, and on 1 April she was celebrated at the Veneralia festival^[5] with public bathing.

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.

The epithet Verticordia derives from the Latin words verto, "turn", and cor, the heart as "the seat of subjective experience and wisdom".^[2] The conversion, however, was thought of as occurring in the mind – the mens or "ethical core".^[2] Women were thus viewed as having the moral agency necessary for shaping society, albeit in roles differing from men.^[2]

The cult of Venus Verticordia^[a] was established with the installation of a statue (simulacrum^[6]) around the time of the Second Punic War,^[7] before 204 BC,^[8] possibly 220 BC^[2] or 214 BC,^[9] or as early as 237 or 224 BC.^[10] Its initial location is uncertain – generally, in the Vallis Murcia, between the northern slope of the Minor Aventine and the farther end of the Circus Maximus.^[11] The founding statue was possibly dedicated in the shrine of either Venus Obsequens or Venus Erycina,^[12] or it may have been placed in an open-air precinct (templum) where her temple was later erected.^[13]

Republican denarius depicting Venus Verticordia on the reverse, holding a balance scale and a sceptre, with a small Cupid hovering at her shoulder;^[7][b] the Dioscuri appear on the obverse (issued 46 BC)

Woodcut reconstructing details (Dictionary of Roman Coins, 1889)

The official process behind the dedication was similar to the establishing of other women-centered cults such as that of Fortuna Muliebris or the religious reparations owed to Juno Regina in 207 BC.^[15] 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,^[10] as the most worthy of the honor among them.^[8][12] Pliny the Elder implies that it was the first time a woman was selected for a religious task on behalf of the state in this way,^[16] and says that this process was followed again for the importation of the cult of the Magna Mater by Claudia Quinta.^[17]

The Temple of Venus Verticordia (aedes^[18]) 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.^[19][20][21] The women were tried and convicted, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Verticordia's temple was the last of eight the Romans built in accordance with Sibylline authority,^[22] dedicated to ten different deities, seven of them goddesses.^[23] The earlier cult statue of Verticordia may have been moved there.^{[citation needed]}

Work on the temple started in 114 BC. It was located in the Vallis Murcia,^[24] possibly near the shrine of Murcia at the Circus Maximus, but the proximity of functionally overlapping temples to Murcia, Obsequens, and Verticordia leaves uncertainties in interpreting the ancient texts.^[25] 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 the buildings in this area have been detected in the archaeological record.^[26] 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.^[27]

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.^[28] Ancient sources say that both the dedication of the statue and the building of the temple were religious responses during a time of military and social crisis.^[29]

In consultation with the Sibylline Books in the latter 3rd century BC, the decemviri (a commission of ten men) had determined that a statue of Venus Verticordia was required in response to the impudicitia of Roman matrons.^[30] After a sort of "real virtue contest" among the ten finalists,^[31] the honor of making the dedication went to a Sulpicia,^[32] who may or may not be a verifiable historical figure.^[33] Valerius Maximus says that Sulpicia was the daughter of a Paterculus and the wife of a Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, presumably the consul of 237 BC.^[34] She is described in superlatives as sanctissima ("most holy"),^[35] elevated above all others in castitas ("purity"),^[35] and pudicissima, of utmost sexual integrity.^[36] The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann imagined Sulpicia herself as the model for the statue,^[37] since she embodied the desired virtues.^[38]

About a hundred years after the statue was dedicated, as tensions in North Africa were mounting for the Iugurthine War, the Temple of Venus Verticordia was built in response to a prodigy (prodigium). The protagonist in the story was a virgin, Greek parthenos in Plutarch and virgo in Latin sources, named as Elbia, Elvia, or Helvia. Plutarch (early 2nd century AD) says Elbia was out horseback riding when she was struck dead by a lightning bolt. She was found naked, with her dress (chiton) pulled up as if on purpose, and with her shoes, rings, and headdress torn off and scattered around. Her mouth was open, and the tongue was hanging out. Her horse was also found dead and stripped of its trappings. The haruspices (manteis)^[39] immediately connected the incident to a disgrace among the Vestals, probably issuing their response in September 114 BC,^[39] and an investigation was launched.^[c][40]

Julius Obsequens (late 4th/early 5th century AD), who compiled a collection of prodigies and drew on now-lost parts of the Augustan-era historian Livy's work, dates the incident to the consulship of Manius Acilius Balbus and Gaius Porcius Cato in 114 BC. He identifies the virgin as the daughter of a Publius Elvius, a member of the equestrian order. While Plutarch has her out riding alone and her body later discovered, in Obsequens' account she is traveling in the company of her father from the Roman Games to Apulia when the incident occurs in the ager Stellas, the Stellate Plain.^[39][d] She is left dead by the lightning strike, with her garment pulled up to expose her genitals and her tongue hanging out, as if fire had flashed from the "lower places" (per inferiores locos) to her mouth. While the death of the horse is not explicitly reported, its trappings (ornamenta) are said to have been scattered about.^[e]

In the version of the Christian writer Orosius (died ca. 420 AD), the equestrian Lucius Helvius was returning to Apulia from Rome with his wife and daughter when a storm struck the traveling party. Seeing that his daughter was upset by the storm, he decided to leave the vehicles behind and to proceed more quickly on horseback to seek shelter. But when the girl rode into the middle of the caravan, she was struck dead by lightning, which caused her clothing to be pulled off without being torn – the bindings at her breast and feet were undone, and her necklaces and rings yanked off. She was left lying "in an obscene manner", naked but with no injury apparent, and her tongue hanging out "just a little". As with Plutarch, the horse is struck dead too, and its bridle and harnessing unfastened and scattered. The wife, unmentioned in the other versions, plays no role in the story.^[f]

Outside the taking of official auspices, an unsought sign that violated the predictable orderliness of the physical world occasioned alarm. The prodigium was a sign of divine displeasure, and the religious offense that provoked it had to be identified and expiated. The frequency of recorded prodigies seems to have been especially intense during the Second Punic War, and these were often accompanied by lightning, a speciality of Etruscan divination.^[41] The forensic techniques for interpreting lightning accounted for elements such as the direction from which the strike came and what kind of damage it left. For instance, Jullius Obsequens traced the path of the strike from "lower places" to the mouth – lightning from below being one of the standard signifying types.^[42] The scattering of the horse trappings, according to Obsequens, was a sign that pointed to the involvement of the equestrian order.^[g]

The Sibylline books were consulted, and an official pronouncement (responsum) formalized the accusation against members of the equestrian order along with three Vestals in the disgrace, which Obsequens labels infamia. The consultation with the Sibylline books may have been the source for the epithet Verticordia, modeled after the Greek cult of Aphrodite Apostrophia, who turned away (from apo-, "away," and stroph-, "turn") disordered acts of sexuality.^[43] Danielle Porte saw apotropaism in the powers of Venus Verticordia, as suggested by the prodigy's imagery of exposed genitals (like the anasyrma gesture) and the protruding tongue characteristic of gorgoneia.^[44][45]

The founding of Verticordia's temple, however, was deemed insufficient to avert the panic, and was supplemented by a rare human sacrifice in ancient Rome—of two couples, one Greek and the other Celtic. Livy calls the practice "hardly Roman", but it seems to have been the second time this particular rite was enacted, the first carried out during the Hannibalic War.^[46] According to Plutarch, it was the last human sacrifice carried out in Rome.^[47]

The feast day of Venus took place on 1 April (the Kalends). Verticordia may have supplanted or been a refinement of an older form of Venus originally honored on the Kalends,^[49] and she shares the day with Fortuna Virilis, an older instantiation of the goddess Fortuna whose origins are unknown.^[50] The Kalends of April was one of the three days during the year when a woman expected to receive a gift from her male romantic partner, the other two being her birthday and the Sigillaria in December.^[51] No games (ludi) were held as they were for many other religious festivals.^[52]

The whole month of April, Latin Aprilis, was under the guardianship (tutela) of Venus,^[53] and Ovid and others took Aphrodite, the name of her Greek counterpart, as the origin of the word Aprilis.^[54] The more common view among the Romans was that Aprilis derived from the verb aperire, "to open", according to Verrius Flaccus because it was the month when "fruits and flowers and animals and seas and lands do open".^[55] April and June were the most propitious months for weddings, as they were presided over by Venus and then Juno as a goddess of marriage.^{[citation needed]} The April religious calendar was dominated by female rites, with major festivals for Magna Mater ("Great Mother") and Ceres as well as days for Venus.^[56] The Kalends is not named as the Veneralia until the Calendar of 354 AD, which illustrates the month of April with a scene from the theatrical ludi of Magna Mater.^[57]

Bronze statuettes of a diademed Venus with the loose locks of the Anadyomene type: at left, jewelled from Baalbek, Roman Africa (1st–2nd century AD); at right, a pudica pose (ca. 150 AD, National Archaeological Museum, Florence)

The most detailed source on the Veneralia is the Kalends of April section in Book 4 of Ovid's poem about the Roman calendar, the Fasti,^[58] but the word Verticordia is metrically impossible in elegiac couplets and thus can't be used as an epithet for Venus in the poem.^[59] Ovid refers to Verticordia, however, in a line that plays on the etymology of the epithet: inde Venus verso nomina corde tenet,^[60] "and from her change of heart Venus holds her title."^[61]

According to Ovid, the cult image of Venus was bathed and redressed in the ritual act of lavatio.^[62] The goddess's rich adornments and gold necklaces were removed, and after she had been washed head to toe and polished dry, she was decked with not only her jewellery but also fresh roses and other flowers.^[63] Rose adornment was also part of the Vinalia, the wine festival on 23 April^[64] when Venus Erycina was celebrated. Ovid is the only source for Verticordia's lavatio, and the earliest for the bathing of the cult statue of the Magna Mater, which was carried to the river Almo during her festival 4–10 April, the Megalensia.^[65] Statue-bathing was not characteristic of early Roman religion; it may have served a practical purpose that was ritualized to preserve the sanctity of the image, or even been reconceptualized as an annual cleansing of offenses committed against the goddesses.^[6]

At the Veneralia, matrons and brides were to supplicate^[66] Verticordia, seeking physical beauty, socially approved behaviors, and a good reputation,^[h] while women of lesser standing (mulieres humiliores) celebrated Fortuna Virilis^[67] by burning incense.^[68] The celebrants of Verticordia bathed communally, crowned in wreaths of myrtle,^[69] a plant especially associated with Venus and eroticism but not used in bridal wreaths.^[70] Ovid explains the origin (aetion) of myrtle-wearing with a brief version of the myth of Venus Anadyomene rising naked from the sea, recognizable as such in the poem by the "hair-drying pose" he describes.^[71] As she is wringing out her dripping hair on the shore, she becomes aware of a rowdy band of satyrs watching her.^[72] Unlike the usual myth in which an enraged goddess punishes the man who has seen her,^[i] Ovid's Venus simply covers herself with myrtle and goes about her pleasurable business.^[78] "Nakedness, baths, and female sexuality" form a kind of "expressive module" for the holiday.^[79] "The nakedness that lies at the center of this celebration is no taboo," Alessandro Barchiesi observed of Ovid's reassembling of the religious materials, but "is a public gesture" emulating the ancestress of the Romans as Aeneadae,^[j] descendants of Aeneas, son of Venus.^[81]

Participants also emulated Venus in consuming cocetum,^[83] a slurry of poppy seed, milk, and honey that served a ceremonial purpose similar to the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The festival of Ceres – Greek Demeter for whom poppy was emblematic – began 12 April with games and performances in the Circus Maximus and concluded 19 April with the Cerialia.^{[84] [85][86]} The poppy beverage may have helped relax or sedate anxious virgin brides,^[87][88][89] or had an aphrodisiac^[90] or more strongly narcotic or hallucinatory effect, depending on the opiate content of the poppy.^[91] Ovid offers another origin story for brides consuming the cocetum, saying that Venus herself drank it on her wedding night.^[83] But he undermines an image of Venus as a model wife with the sexuality of Venus as a woman, framing her feast day with reminders of Mars, her regular consort to whom she was not married;^[k] she drank the cocetum to endure her arranged marriage to the unattractive but eager bridegroom Vulcan,^[95][96] and her son Aeneas, father of the Roman people, was born from her adulterous desire for the mortal Anchises.^[97]

Ovid's artistic intermingling of Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis and his social commentary on the division of the celebrants is "notoriously controversial"^[98] and "puzzlingly paradigmatic" as a historical source.^[99] The name Fortuna Virilis means something closer to "Good Luck in Men" than "Manly Fortune", or "Lucky Guy" if the women's actions are meant as a "privileged exhibition" for the men^[100] – the women may be hesitant that taking off their clothes exposes physical imperfection, but that isn't what Fortuna Virilis lets men see.^[101] Her origins are no later than the 4th century BC, predating the dedication of Verticordia's statue,^[102] and Plutarch traces a temple of Fortuna Virilis back to the semilegendary king Servius Tullius,^[103] to whom many such foundings were attributed in myth. In the late 4th century BC, public bathing might have taken place at the public pool (piscina publica), but the appearance of the women at the men's public baths has to be a later development, since these were not in use until the 2nd century BC.^[104]

The 1 April feast day was celebrated widely, perhaps universally, by Roman women, but ancient sources seem to indicate social stratification in what aspects they might participate in. The bathing and adornment of Verticordia's statue could involve only a limited number of women, and selectivity of merit was inherent in the establishment of her cult. The women who attended on her wore the respectable attire of the matron. Women of lesser status attended to Fortuna Virilis, and then they – or perhaps all women^[l] – crowned themselves in myrtle like Venus and went to share a "fecundating" bath^[107] in public view of men,^[108] who watch as the satyrs did.^[100] Earlier in the Fasti, Ovid had used the word iuventus ("the youth" as a collective), which in this period often meant an elite troop of young men of the equestrian order, to refer to a band of satyrs subject to Venus,^[109] and T. P. Wiseman conjectured that in the 4th century BC, the rites on the Kalends of April may even have involved men dressing as satyrs.^[110]

The mutual desire of Mars and Venus being fundamental to the Roman state,^[111] the role of Verticordia was not to inhibit sexuality but to promote libido within marriage, which Cicero described as "the seedbed of the republic" (seminarium rei publicae).^[112] About nine months later, the Carmentalia that celebrated the goddess of childbirth^[113] was for all women giving birth, a festival unusually without social segregation.^[114]

By the early second century AD, the rituals of Fortuna Virilis on 1 April had been absorbed into the cult of Venus Verticordia.^[115] By late antiquity the drinking of cocetum and practices associated with Fortuna Virilis seem to have fallen into disuse.^[116] The Veneralia may have been the setting Augustine of Hippo had in mind in a sermon on Mary and Martha, dated around AD 393, when he writes that "we" should not get carnally distracted by "banquets of Venus" (epulae venerales) but practice moderate behavior (modestia).^[117] Augustine advised forbearance, not passion,^[m] as a way to approach the secular banquet of Venus, which he seems to regard as "rather a respectable affair in 'celebration of a life of harmony and fullness'".^[118] The 6th-century antiquarian Ioannes Lydus, writing in Greek, says that women of higher rank had worshipped Aphrodite on 1 April "to achieve concord (homonoia) and a modest life",^[119] with no mention of Fortuna Virilis.

The first Roman shrine (aedes) to an instantiation of Venus had been built during the Third Samnite War in 295 BC,^[120] located near the racetrack of the Circus Maximus. Funded by fines imposed by the curule aedile Fabius Gurges on matronae for engaging in sexual misconduct (stuprum),^[121] it was dedicated to Venus Obsequens – "Compliant" Venus.^[122] 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.^[123] The "turning" or conversion of Venus Verticordia is not a suppression of sexual desire but a purposing of its power for social benefit^[124] in a display of personal excellence.^[125]

In the month of Venus, on 23 April, a day comparable to the Greek Aphrodisia festival^[126] was devoted to Venus Erycina extra portam Collinam, "Venus of Eryx outside the Colline Gate" and hence outside the sacred boundary of Rome (pomerium) as foreign rites traditionally were. Sex workers (meretrices) attended while socially respectable women celebrated the same goddess with "cleaned up" rites at the Vinalia festival on the Capitoline.^[127] The lower-class women (mulieres humiliores) who celebrated Fortuna Virilis on the Kalends of April would have included prostitutes as well.^[127] Sarah Pomeroy believed that the humiliores comprised only prostitutes, but this is not standard usage of the word,^[128] and Ovid undermines even the usual social distinction between the humiliores and women of the upper social orders^{[127][129][n]} in the inclusivity of the 1 April festivities.^[131]

Venus Erycina was a Punic cult^[132] imported from Sicily, and her temple was built as the result of a wartime vow, most likely in 212 BC at the close of the Siege of Syracuse which gave Rome control of the island. At her second temple on the Capitoline, Erycina was eventually assimilated to Venus Genetrix, Venus as the generative mother of the Roman people, a moral amelioration of Erycina that indicates "prostitution was not the only item in her portfolio."^[133] The development of Erycina's cult shows the counterbalancing of an ideation of sexual women as whores^[134] by advancing the more self-controlled form of sexuality (pudicitia) for women within marriage, which Verticordia also embodied.^{[132][135][134]}

The social separation between Fortuna Virilis and Venus Verticordia, and between the two temples of Venus Erycina, had played out earlier in similar dynamic tension as the Conflict of the Orders sought resolution.^[136] A patrician woman had married a plebeian and consequently was deemed ineligible to participate in the cult of Pudicitia Patricia, "Pudicitia for Patricians". In response, she established a shrine to Pudicitia Plebeia as an alternative for socially aspiring plebeians in 295 BC.^[137] Pudicitia was the public moral arena in which women competed as men did in virtus, "manly" excellence.^[138] Only univirae, married women who had been with only one man, could be admitted to either cult of Pudicitia, emphasizing a woman's success at the self-management of her own sexuality beyond social expectations or male desire.^[139] The shrines of both Pudicitia Plebeia and Venus Verticordia were established in response to prodigies at a time of crisis in the Roman state; it is a frequent pattern that repairing social disorder required the public demonstration of the sexual and moral integrity of Roman women.^[140]

The location of the Temple of Venus Verticordia in the Vallis Murcia also raises questions about her relation to the obscure goddess Murcia, the varied spelling of whose name led to her identification with Venus Murtea or Myrtea, "Venus of the Myrtle Grove".^[141] Servius says that Verticordia's temple precinct (fanum) was near the Circus Maximus in a former myrtle grove,^[142] which was also the site of the Rape of the Sabine Women.^[143] As a pretext for the founding act of bride abduction, Romulus had invited the Sabine families to a festival in honor of the god named by Plutarch as Poseidon Hippios ("Horse Poseidon"), Latinized as Neptunus Equester ("Equestrian Neptune") and identified with the archaic god Consus. The underground altar of Consus was located at one of the two points of the Circus Maximus where the chariots turned, the meta Murciae, near the myrtle grove.^[144] In earliest times, the site was largely flooded by the Tiber river in April, a terrain supporting the conceptualization of Venus rising from the "sea" among the myrtles, but in the driest months, the area was devoted to horse races,^[145] especially in August, when Venus's second Vinalia of the year was held on the 19th, two days before the horse-racing festival of Consus.^[146]

The Greek equivalent of Verticordia, Aphrodite Apostrophia ("Aphrodite of Turning Away"^[o]) was complementary to Demeter Erinys.^[147] The April rites of Roman Ceres were not based on the primary Greek myth of Demeter^[148] – the abduction of her daughter Persephone to serve as the bride of Pluto – and yet Ovid chooses to narrate it at disproportionate length in his treatment of April in the Fasti.^[149] This choice may have been motivated by the complex nexus in Greek myth and cult between Demeter Erinys and Aphrodite Apostrophia.^[150] Demeter Erinys ("Furious Demeter") represents the rightful anger the goddess felt^[151] after she herself was raped during her search for her daughter, having turned herself into a mare to try to evade Poseidon only to have him transform into a stallion to mount her.^[p] Erinys is the drive for vengeance, rendered into lawfulness by Demeter Thesmophoros ("Bringer of Laws", thesmoi) who preserves family order and the state.^[154] Although Demeter's Thesmophoria is framed broadly as an all-female "fertility" festival, the second day became a "forum for crime detection and dispute resolution" pervaded by the complaint of the wronged goddess.^[155]

The animalizing potential of desire is "turned away" by Aphrodite Apostrophia (from apo-, "away" and strophein, "to turn") – so called because she diverted the human race from acting on desires that were contrary to nomos (ἐπιθυμίας τε ἀνόμου) and from unholy deeds (ἔργων ἀνοσίων),^[156] such as the incestuous union that produced Adonis,^[q] the beautiful youth unsatisfactorily loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone.

Incest plays a role in one version of how the Roman Bona Dea, whose rites seem most comparable to the Thesmophoria, became a goddess.^[157] In most tellings, she is deified after her husband, Faunus, beats her with a myrtle branch when he finds her drinking wine – in one account, to death^[158] – but Macrobius has her as his daughter, whom he beats with myrtle when she refuses sex even though he has plied her with wine. In the hands of Faunus, who in the later tradition is often depicted with satyr-like features, the myrtle of Venus becomes an instrument for "excessive erotic desire"; it was banned from Bona Dea's temple^[159] on the slope of the Aventine,^[160] above the "Valley of Myrtle".

In Verticordia's mythology, the threat of bestial sexuality is represented by the satyrs in Ovid's account of Venus's bath,^[161] and by the prodigy of the horse-riding virgin, whose body is found with signs that ordinarily might be interpreted as rape.^[150] The German philologist Carl Koch suggested that the Sibylline consultation calling for a temple to Venus Verticordia might have directly prescribed the model of Apostrophia, as was the case with some other transferrals of Greek or other deities to Rome.^[43]

The feast day of Venus Verticordia was one of two April holidays featuring the public nudity of women, the second being stage performances at the Floralia that started at the end of the month and continued into May.^[162] For the Floralia, however, the bodies of entertainers and prostitutes were on display; on the Kalends, even respectable matrons removed the garments that marked them as such, the long dress (stola) that covered them to their feet and the headbands (vittae) that bound their hair.^[163] Valerius Maximus attributed a kind of inviolability to the stola, stating that it was not to be subjected to the touch of an "alien" hand^[r] – meaning someone outside the family – even if the matron came under arrest.^[164] The unwilling removal of the protective garment would be a violation, but its willing removal and the reclaiming of the nude body held power: "Like the Gorgon's eye, it can paralyze or protect."^[165] Although female nudity among the Archaic and Classical Greeks had been taboo, "respectable female nudity" was imported into Italy via the Etruscans and took the form of Hellenistic Aphrodite.^[166]

The Venus Pudica statuary type displays the goddess naked, and the placement of her hands is not obviously defensive but rather instructs the viewer toward the erogenous zones of the female body.^{[167][168][169]} The sometime presence of a cloth or drapery is ambiguous as to whether Pudica has just removed her garment or is about to put it on, and in some versions, such as the Mazarin Venus (at the top of this article), suggests a striptease.^[170] The apparent erasure of social rank was renegotiated by the practice of wearing jewellery in the baths, as documented by archaeological finds in drains and modeled by the bejewelling of Venus statues.^[171]

Both the Venus Anadyomene and Pudica types are associated with rising from the water, sometimes indicated by a hydria (water vessel)^[173] or dolphin, with bathing a reenactment of the goddess's birth from the sea. Ovid's description of Venus with dripping hair for the Kalends of April may have been inspired by a painting in the anaydomene pose that Augustus had exhibited in the Temple of the Deified Julius.^[174] Pudica, however, is well coiffed. Roman matrons were not portrayed with the loose, wet locks of Anadyomene,^[175] which released an eroticism that might not be fully under control; elaborately bound-up hairstyles were not simply ornamental but "upright" in the moral sense.^[176][58] The polymath Varro said that the piled-up hairstyle of Roman matrons was called a tutulus from the word tutus, "safe", and was also nicknamed an arx, like the citadel of the city^[58] – just as functionally the cult of Verticordia was established to safeguard the city.^[177] And just as women reenacted the role of Venus in the rites of 1 April,^[178] they were portrayed quite literally as Venus in sculpture, with their own portrait head placed on a conventional body type of the goddess^[179][180] – a costly form of self-expression available only to those who could afford it, from the wives of emperors to successful freedwomen.^[181] Although nude, their portraits exhibit "flawless reserve and self-possession".^[182]

• Venus Verticordia (1868), an allegorical Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti