Juno

Juno was to the Roman the abstraction of womanhood as Jupiter was the abstraction of manhood. This is the genuine Roman conception of Juno, and to this we must look and not to any nature-myth for the explanation of this deity. As Mommsen has said (Hist. of Rome, i. 28), what distinguishes Roman religion from Greek is that in the former 'to everything existing, to man and to the tree, to the state and to the storeroom, a spirit was assigned, which came into being with it and perished along with it, the counterpart in the spiritual domain of the physical phenomenon; to the man the male genius, to the woman the female Juno.' This is the first point to notice in analysing this deity; Juno is the counterpart in the spiritual domain of the female principle in the human world. The next step in the analysis is indicated again by Mommsen: 'In occupations even the steps of the process were spiritualised; thus, for example, in the prayers of the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so on, to those of in-bringing, up-storing, and opening of the granaries.' Following the indication thus given we observe that every step in the life of woman, every function of the female principle, was spiritualised by the Romans, as is shown by the various titles given to Juno—e.g. Virginensis, Matrona, Natalis, Juga, Jugalis, Curitis, Domiduca, Iterduca, Unxia, Pronuba, Cinxia, Fluonia, Ossipaga, Opigena. These spiritual counterparts of the various phases of woman's life were, we may assume, probably not originally all supposed to inhere in one individual deity, but were separate and independent. And here we come to the third step in our analysis; these various spirits—the spirits of marriage, of birth, of travail, &c.—came eventually to be regarded not as separate spirits but as various manifestations of one and the same deity. What, then, was the thread round which these ideas so to speak crystallised? It was in all probability the figure of the Greek Hera. This undoubtedly became known to the Romans through the cities of Magna Græcia at an early period; the 'female Juno' became identified with her; the various attributes of Virginensis, Matrona, &c. were naturally assigned to the new, anthropomorphic Juno; and the other resemblances between Juno and Hera were loans effected at this and later times by the Romans from the Greek. Juno as she appears in Virgil is, of course, a reproduction of the Hera of Homer. See HERA.