Janus

Ovid opens his poem on the Roman calendar with Janus, because the year begins with him (Fasti 1.63-64). He hails him as two-headed Janus, source of the silently gliding year, the only god who sees his own back (Fasti 1.65-66). Then he asks what kind of god Janus is, since Greece has no deity to match him (Fasti 1.89-90). Janus appears in answer, holding a staff in his right hand and a key in his left (Fasti 1.95-100).

His account begins with the universe. The ancients called him Chaos, he says, for he is a thing of great age (Fasti 1.103). Air, fire, water and earth were once a single heap. When they separated, the shapeless ball he had been took on a face and limbs fit for a god (Fasti 1.105-112). His two faces keep a small trace of that confused shape, since his front and back look the same (Fasti 1.113-114).

His office is the second reason. Sky, sea, clouds and lands are all opened and closed by his hand (Fasti 1.117-118). When he lets Peace out of her house, she walks free. Without his bolts holding wars shut in, the world would be soaked in blood (Fasti 1.121-124). He guards the gates of heaven with the Hours, and Jupiter himself comes and goes through his office (Fasti 1.125-126). The priest therefore calls him Patulcius, the opener, and Clusius, the closer (Fasti 1.129-130). Like a doorkeeper by a threshold, he watches east and west at once (Fasti 1.135-140).

Janus also tells of his reign on earth. His citadel was the hill that still carries his name, the Janiculum (Fasti 1.245-246). He ruled when gods mixed with men and Justice had not yet fled the earth (Fasti 1.247-250). He had nothing to do with war. He guarded peace and doorways, and his key was his only weapon (Fasti 1.253-254). It was in this land that he received the exiled Saturn (Fasti 1.235-236).

His one act of war came when Titus Tatius led the Sabines against Rome. A guard bribed with bracelets showed them the silent path up to the citadel (Fasti 1.259-262). Saturn's daughter Juno had removed the bolts from the gate (Fasti 1.265-266). Janus would not fight so great a goddess. Instead he opened the mouths of his springs and poured out sudden water. He first put sulphur into the channels, so the hot flood blocked Tatius's path (Fasti 1.267-272). Once the Sabines were driven off, the place returned to its old form, and Rome built him an altar beside a small shrine (Fasti 1.273-275).

Virgil gives Janus's shrine its most famous description. Latium, he says, had twin Gates of War, held sacred by religion and dread of Mars. A hundred bronze bars and iron bolts kept them shut, and Janus never left the threshold as their guard (Aeneid 7.607-610). When the senators had decided on war, the consul himself, in the Quirinal robe and Gabine belt, unbarred the creaking doors (Aeneid 7.611-614). King Latinus was urged to open them against the Trojans of Aeneas. He refused and shut himself away in darkness, so Juno came down from the sky and burst the iron-bound doors herself (Aeneid 7.616-622). The same king kept an old cedar image of two-fronted Janus in his palace, beside old Saturn (Aeneid 7.177-181).

Livy credits the shrine to Numa, Rome's second king. To soften a people made fierce by war, Numa set up the Janus at the foot of the Argiletum as a sign of peace and war. Open, it meant Rome was under arms. Shut, it meant every neighbouring people was at peace (Ab Urbe Condita 1.19.2). Livy adds that it had been shut only twice since Numa. The first time was in the consulship of Titus Manlius after the First Punic War. The second was under Augustus after Actium (Ab Urbe Condita 1.19.3). Augustus gives his own count. It was shut twice in all before his birth, and three times on the senate's order while he led the state (Res Gestae 13).

Ovid's Metamorphoses retells the Sabine attack with a different cast. Juno opens the gate without a sound, and Venus alone notices. Venus asks the nymphs whose spring lay next to the shrine of Janus for help. They release their waters and heat them with sulphur and burning pitch, until the doorposts of Janus smoke with the spray (Metamorphoses 14.778-797). The flooded gate holds the Sabines back until the Roman soldiers are armed, and then Romulus offers battle (Metamorphoses 14.797-800).

Ovid's Fasti also tells of a nymph named Crane, who escaped her suitors by sending them ahead into a cave and then hiding. The trick failed with Janus, who sees what happens behind his back. He found her hiding place and seized her (Fasti 6.119-126). As the price of her virginity, he gave her power over the hinge and a branch of whitethorn to keep harm from doorways (Fasti 6.127-130).

Later writers explained Janus's place at the head of Roman worship. Cicero says that beginnings and endings matter most in everything, so the Romans made Janus first in sacrifice. He derives the name from going (ab eundo), which is why passages are called iani and house doors ianuae (De Natura Deorum 2.67). Macrobius, writing around 400 CE, reports that Janus was invoked first in any rite so that prayers could pass through his doors to the other gods (Saturnalia 1.9.9). He lists the titles used in worship: Geminus, Pater, Junonius, Consivius, Quirinus, Patulcius and Clusivius (Saturnalia 1.9.15). He also says that after Saturn vanished from Latium, Janus founded an altar to him with rites he named the Saturnalia (Saturnalia 1.7.24).