Review article
Temples and Sanctuaries of Venus in the Roman Province of Dalmatia (Summary)
Tomislav Kiš
Abstract
Venus’s popularity gradually grew from humble beginnings at an unknown moment in early Roman history to the last decades of the Republic, when Pompey and Caesar placed themselves under the goddess’s protection and thus directly contributed to the greatest rise of her cult. Not long after that, the cult of Venus also appeared in the (future) province of Dalmatia, where it was more easily accepted since the indigenous population already worshipped female deities of similar roles and the cult of Aphrodite was introduced to certain localities during the Greek colonization of the Adriatic. The continuing importance of the Roman cult in the spiritual life of the inhabitants of the province of Dalmatia is best evidenced by the construction of temples and sanctuaries in which it was maintained. They appeared in Dalmatia from the beginning of the penetration of Roman deities until their substitution by Christianity, and their existence is confirmed today by the remains of architecture, epigraphic monuments and sculptural representations of the goddess. In this paper, the primary attention is paid to the monuments that directly confirm or could point to the places of worship of Venus in Curicum, Aenona, Potirna on the island of Korčula, Diocletian’s Palace in Split and Salona. In addition, other monuments that suggest the organization of spaces dedicated to Venus in other localities of Roman Dalmatia are briefly mentioned. It is concluded that almost all material evidence of the cult of Venus was found in the localities of the eastern coast of the Adriatic, from which follows that it was only sporadically represented in the province’s interior. Such geographical distribution of the findings and, consequentially, sacralized spaces is partly the result of the fact that the largest cities were located on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, where a significant proportion of the highly Romanized population with the most complex religious requirements lived, and partly the consequence of Venus’ mythological background and roles closely related to the sea, navigation and sailors. The wide range of her divine characteristics was reflected in the worship of multiple variants of the goddess in temples and sanctuaries built out of different individual, collective, political, ideological and other needs. In most cases, their character is difficult to determine, but based on the available information it seems that public and larger private buildings mostly ended with exedrae. In that case, they would have emulated the ground plans of the most important Venus temples in the city of Rome and thus deviated from the common practice of erecting straight rear walls, as can be observed on other formalized buildings of a sacred character from Roman Dalmatia.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
330256
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2024.
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