Egeria (mythology)

In Roman mythology, the water nymph Egeria ("of the black poplar") was associated with Diana, presiding over childbirth (for her aid, like Ilithyia's, was invoked by women in labor), and sharing her wisdom and prophecy for simple libations of water or milk. She had a sacred grove near where the Baths of Caracalla were erected in the 3rd century. Egeria was one of the Camenae, minor deities who were superseded by the Muses as Rome fell under the cultural hegemony of Greece; so Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed her among the Muses (ii. 6o). Egeria seems to predate Roman myth, however, and to have been of Etruscan origins, for she was a nymph consort to the Sabine Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, whom she would meet in her sacred grove and whom she taught matters relating to being a wise and just king (Livy i. 19).

Related Topics:
Roman mythology - Nymph - Diana - Ilithyia - Baths of Caracalla - Camenae - Muses - Hegemony - Dionysius of Halicarnassus - Etruscan - Sabine - Numa Pompilius - Rome - Livy

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When Numa Pompilius died, she changed into a well (Ovid, Metamorphoses xv. 479). Besides the one close by Rome, at Porta Capena, another sacred to Egeria was located in the sacred forest of Aricia in Latium, the grove of Diana Nemorensis ("Diana of Nemi"). The ancient nympheum of Egeria survives in the Parco della Caffarella between the Appian Way and the even more ancient Via Latina. In the 2nd century AD, when Herodes Atticus recast an inherited villa nearby as a great landscaped estate the natural grotto was formalized as an arched interior with an apsidal end where a statue of Egeria once stood in a niche; the surfaces were enriched with revetments of green and white marble facings and green porphyry flooring and friezes of mosaic. The primeval spring, one of dozens of springs that flow into the river Almone, was made to feed large pools one of which was known as Lacus Salutaris the "Lake of Health". Juvenal, (Satires iii. 17&ndash20) regretted an earlier phase of architectural elaboration:

Related Topics:
Ovid - Metamorphoses - Latium - Nemi - Appian Way - Via Latina - Herodes Atticus - Apsidal end - Juvenal

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:Nymph of the Spring! More honour?d hadst thou been,

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:If, free from art, an edge of living green,

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:Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed alone,

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:And marble ne?er profaned the native stone. (William Gifford, translator).

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The ninfeo was a favored picnic spot for 19th century Romans and is still visitable in the archaeological park of the Caffarella http://www.romacivica.net/tarcaf/engfra/cafgen_e.htm.

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"At Aricia there was also a Manius Egerius, a male counterpart of Egeria" (Encyclopædia Britannica 1911).

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The name is used as an eponym for a woman advisor or counselor.

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