Luna, the Roman goddess: the Aventine temple and the Palatine Noctiluca

Before she was identified with Diana, the Moon had a cult of her own in Rome, under a name identical to that of the heavenly body. Luna was an ancient goddess, rarely present in myths but firmly rooted in the places of the city. Latin sources preserve scattered traces of her, yet these are enough to reconstruct an independent figure, worshipped in her own temples and depicted with precise attributes, distinct from the great goddesses who later absorbed her.

A Sabine origin

Varro, in De lingua Latina, lists Luna among the deities to whom the Sabine king Titus Tatius, according to tradition, consecrated altars in Rome, alongside Sol, Flora, Vesta and others. This information must be taken with the caution due to all reports about the regal period, but it shows that the Romans considered the cult of the Moon very old, going back to the very origins of the city and to the union of Latins and Sabines.

Varro also mentions on the Palatine a shrine of Luna Noctiluca, «she who lights up the night», so called because a light was kept burning there during the night hours. The note is brief but precious, since it attests a cult linked to Rome's oldest hill and a rite that imitated, with a lamp, the function of the heavenly body.

The temple on the Aventine

The goddess's most important sanctuary stood on the Aventine. Roman calendars set its anniversary on 31 March. Livy relates that in 182 BC a violent storm tore off the doors of the temple of Luna and hurled them against the rear of the nearby temple of Ceres, an event recorded among the prodigies of the year. The episode gives an idea of the position of the two buildings, close together on the same hill.

Tacitus, describing the great fire of AD 64 under Nero, includes the temple of Luna among the very ancient buildings that were destroyed, and attributes it to King Servius Tullius. Other venerable sanctuaries of the city burned with it. After that date reports of the temple become uncertain, and we do not know precisely whether or how it was rebuilt.

The biga and the day of the Moon

In Roman iconography Luna drives a biga, a two-horse chariot, while Sol drives a quadriga. The distinction recurs on coins of the Republic, where the goddess appears with a crescent on her head, and on reliefs of the imperial age, in which Sol and Luna often frame the main scene on either side as symbols of eternity and of the cycle of time. In the reliefs of the cult of Mithras, for example, their busts look out from the upper corners.

With the spread of the planetary week in the first centuries of the empire, the second day was called dies Lunae, the day of the Moon. From that phrase come the Italian lunedì, the French lundi and the Spanish lunes, while the English Monday and the German Montag carry on the same idea through the Germanic word for the Moon.

Only a few fragments of the cult of Luna remain, then, but each is significant: an altar attributed to the Sabines, a lamp on the Palatine, a temple shaken by a storm and destroyed by fire, a two-horse chariot. These are slight clues, which historians piece together patiently. And above all there remains a name that still opens the week across much of Europe.