Janus

Every Roman prayer began with Janus. Before Jupiter, before any other god, the priest invoked the god of beginnings. Ovid, in the Fasti, lets Janus explain why: “Whatever you see, sky, sea, clouds, earth, everything is closed and opened by my hand.” The god who controls thresholds must be crossed first.

The Two Faces

Janus looked forward and backward at the same time. Roman coins depicted him this way from the earliest period. He saw the past and the future, the inside and the outside, the beginning and the end. The image was not metaphorical. Roman doorways were sacred boundaries, and Janus was the power that inhabited them. The word janua (door) carries his name.

The Temple Doors

The Temple of Janus in the Roman Forum had a distinctive ritual: its doors stood open during wartime and closed during peace. Livy records that in the entire history of the Republic, the doors were closed only three times. Once under Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king. Once after the First Punic War. And once under Augustus, who made a point of closing them to advertise the Pax Romana. The doors spent most of seven centuries open. Rome was almost always at war.

No Greek Equivalent

Janus has no counterpart in Greek mythology. Most Roman gods were syncretized with Greek ones through the interpretatio Romana: Jupiter with Zeus, Mars with Ares, Venus with Aphrodite. Janus stands alone. He appears to be a genuinely indigenous Italic deity, preserved from a religious stratum older than the Hellenizing influence that reshaped Roman religion in the third and second centuries BCE.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Ovid, Fasti I: Janus speaks about himself
• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita: the doors of Janus’s temple
• Macrobius, Saturnalia I.9: theology of Janus
• Plutarch, Numa: Janus temple closed by Numa Pompilius