Egeria

Nella mitologia romana Egeria è una delle antiche divinità latine delle acque sorgive, le Camene.

Leggenda

Secondo la leggenda, fu amante, consigliera (sulle leggi religiose e sulle riforme) e in seguito moglie del re Numa Pompilio.. Quando il re morì, Egeria si sciolse in lacrime, dando vita a una fonte (...donec pietate dolentis / mota soror Phoebi gelidum de corpore fontem / fecit... Ovidio, Metam. XV 549-551), che divenne il suo luogo sacro, e che la tradizione identifica con la sorgente esistente presso la Porta Capena. Esiste anche un'altra fonte Egeria nel bosco di Ariccia, sui monti Albani, vicino a Roma.
A Egeria venivano offerti sacrifici da parte delle donne incinte per il buon esito del parto. Era chiamata anche Camena, che significa cantante, vaticinatrice, e per questa ragione la valle in cui si trovava la fonte di Egeria era detta Valle Camenarum. I colloqui tra la ninfa e il Re si svolgevano nella grotta nel Bosco delle Camene. Insieme a Virbio, altra divinità minore del pantheon latino, la si ritrova associata al culto di Diana Nemorensis, nel Nemus Aricinum, l'insieme dei boschi che circondavano il lago di Nemi presso Aricia.
Alla sua figura è stato dedicato l'asteroide 13 Egeria.

Egeria nel bosco delle Camene di Claude Lorrain

1669

Egeria (Latin: Ēgeria) was a nymph attributed a legendary role in the early history of Rome as a divine consort and counselor of Numa Pompilius, the second Sabine king of Rome, to whom she imparted laws and rituals pertaining to ancient Roman religion. Her name is used as an eponym for a female advisor or counselor.

Origin and etymology

Egeria may predate Roman myth: she could have been of Italic origin in the sacred forest of Aricia in Latium, her immemorial site, which was equally the grove of Diana Nemorensis ("Diana of Nemi"). At Aricia there was also a Manius Egerius, a male counterpart of Egeria.
The name Egeria has been diversely interpreted; it might mean "of the black poplar"; Georges Dumézil proposed it came from "e-gerere", suggesting it came from her childbirth role; her role as prophetess and author of "sacred books" would compare her to the Etruscan figure of Vegoia (alleged author among other things of "Libri Fulgurales", which give keys to interpreting the meaning of lightning strokes, seen as ominous messages from a variety of deities).

Function

Egeria as a nymph or minor goddess of the Roman religious system is of unclear origin; she is consistently, though not in a very clear way, associated with another figure of the Diana type; their cult is known to have been celebrated at sacred groves, such as the site of Nemi at Aricia, and another one close to Rome (see section below); both goddesses are also associated with water bearing wondrous, religious or medical properties (the source in that grove at Rome was dedicated to the exclusive use of the Vestals); their cult was associated with other, male figures of even more obscure meaning, such as one named Virbius, or a Manius Egerius, presumably a youthful male, that anyway in later years was identified with figures like Atys or Hippolyte, because of the Diana reference (see Frazer).
Described sometime as a "mountain nymph" (Plutarch), she is usually regarded as a water nymph and somehow her cult also involved some link with childbirth, like the Greek goddess Ilithyia.
But most of all, Egeria gave wisdom and prophecy in return for libations of water or milk at her sacred groves. This quality has been made especially popular through the tale of her relationship with Numa Pompilius (the second legendary king of Rome, who succeeded its founder Romulus).

Relationship with Numa Pompilius

According to mythology she counseled and guided the King Numa Pompilius (Latin "numen" designates "the expressed will of a deity") in the establishment of the original framework of laws and rituals of Rome. Numa is reputed to have written down the teachings of Egeria in "sacred books" that he had buried with him. When a chance accident brought them back to light some 500 years later, the Senate deemed them inappropriate for disclosure to the people, and ordered their destruction. What made them inappropriate was some matter of religious nature with "political" bearing that apparently has not been handed down by Valerius Antias, the source that Plutarch was using. Dionysius of Halicarnassus hints that they were actually kept as a very close secret by the Pontifices.
She is also gifted with oracular capabilities (she interpreted for Numa the abstruse omens of gods, for instance the episode of the omen from Faunus). In another episode she helps Numa in a battle of wits with Jupiter himself, whereby Numa sought to gain a protective ritual against lightning strokes and thunder.
Numa also invoked communicating with other deities, such as Muses; hence naturally enough, the somewhat "pale" figure of Egeria was later categorized by the Romans as one of the Camenae, deities who came to be equated with the Greek Muses as Rome fell under the cultural influence of Greece; so Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed Egeria among the Muses.

The precise level of her relationship to Numa has been described diversely. She is typically given the respectful label coniuncta ("consort"); Plutarch is very evasive as of the actual mode of intimacy between Numa and Egeria, and hints that Numa himself entertained a level of ambiguity. By Juvenal's day that tradition was treated more critically. Juvenal called her Numa's Amica (or "girlfriend") in a sceptical phrase.
Numa Pompilius died in 673 BC of old age. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, with Numa's death Egeria melted into tears of sorrow, thus becoming a spring (...donec pietate dolentis / mota soror Phoebi gelidum de corpore fontem / fecit... ), traditionally identified with the one nearby Porta Capena in Rome.

Egeria spring in Rome

A spring and a grove once sacred to Egeria stand close to a gate of Rome, the Porta Capena. Its waters were dedicated to the exclusive use of the Vestals. The ninfeo, a favored picnic spot for nineteenth-century Romans, can still be visited in the archaeological park of the Caffarella, between the Appian Way and the even more ancient Via Latina, nearby the Baths of Caracalla (a later construction).
In the second century, when Herodes Atticus recast an inherited villa nearby as a great landscaped estate, the natural grotto was formalized as an arched interior with an apsidal end where a statue of Egeria once stood in a niche; the surfaces were enriched with revetments of green and white marble facings and green porphyry flooring and friezes of mosaic. The primeval spring, one of dozens of springs that flow into the river Almone, was made to feed large pools, one of which was known as Lacus Salutaris or "Lake of Health". Juvenal regretted an earlier phase of architectural elaboration:

Nymph of the Spring! More honour’d hadst thou been,

If, free from art, an edge of living green,

Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed alone,

And marble ne’er profaned the native stone.

In modern literature

In Nathaniel Lee's English Restoration tragedy Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), Egeria appears in a vision to Brutus' son Titus.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem Egeria's Grotto in The New Monthly Magazine, 1826, descriptive of an artistic representation of Egeria's Spring..
In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the priest Chasuble refers to Cecily's tutor Miss Prism as "Egeria."
In Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes, (1911) Madame de S___, a Russian lady of "advanced views" is referred to as the Egeria of Peter Ivanovich, the "heroic fugitive" who wrote books preaching and practicing the cult of women under the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of Madame de S___.

A 16th-century drawing of Egeria

Published by Guillaume Rouille (1518?-1589) - "Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum"

Egeria was a water nymph in Roman mythology. She was most famously the second wife and counselor of the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius.

1554

The nymph Egeria dictating the laws of Rome to Numa Pompilius, by Ulpiano Checa.

Apse of the Ninfeo d'Egeria, Parco Cafarella, Rome

Egeria beautiful well.

Mayer Bruno - Opera propria

Robert MacPherson (1811-1872) - Tivoli - La Fonte di Egeria. 1858

Statue of the nymph Egeria in the Parc del Laberint d’Horta in Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain).

Till F. Teenck

Fuente de la Ninfa Egeria (Laberinto de Horta).

Canaan - Opera propria

Grotto of Egeria in the gardens of Wörlitz

Jwaller - Opera propria

Johann Adolph Hasse - Egeria - picture from the libretto - Vienna 1764.

Illustration of the early Roman king Numa consulting with a nymph on various matters of state and religion.

Walter Crane - F. J. Gould, The Children's Plutarch: Tales of the Romans, 1910, frontispiece.

Château de Chantilly, Nicolas Poussin, Midas, Numa and Egeria

Dguendel - Opera propria

Image by John Leech, from: The Comic History of Rome by Gilbert Abbott A Beckett. Bradbury, Evans & Co, London, 1850s Numa Pompilius remembering the Grotto

Giani, Felice - Numa Pompilio riceve dalla ninfa Egeria le leggi di Roma - center - 1806

Numa and Egeria in an anonymous 1845 engraving

Anonymous engraver - The Rose for 1846, 1845

The Victoria Jubilee Fountain was added in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It is a classical-style fountain with a Corinthian column rising from a heavy formal basin to support the nymph Egeria. She is surrounded by four water babies riding on sea serpents.

Dea romana Egeria - ninfa - originale antica stampa da Incisione xilografica 1855 - velato & nudo petto - arruffati - pronto a telaio

The Nymphaeum of Egeria, La Valle della Caffarella, Rome | by Robert Barone

nymph.egeria

Ninfeo di Egeria

Numa Consulting the Nymph Egeria
Jean Claude Naigeon (1753–1832) (attributed to)
The Bowes Museum

Numa Pompilius converses with the nymph Egeria in a 1792 sculpture by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen. (Library of Congress)

Finally a statue of Egeria, a goddess associated with Diana and her sanctuary at lake Nemi. She was said to be the divinity who imparted to Numa, the Sabine second king of Rome, the religious foundations of that civilization, including the Vestal Virgins, the calendar and its holidays. Women made offerings to her, including model uteruses, as their protector in birth. The "Venus" label applied by the article obscures, as usual, but is even more confusing in a culture where Venus is an actual goddess. The waterpot by her side shows that she is a "nymph," as in female water divinity. She is a meter or more tall. The find spot is a lake in Etruscan country, where drought led to low water levels, making the statue visible. Thanks to Gen Vaughn.